1B29.3 The Forty Shilling Freeholders. ft 



they looked up for the security of their Constitution^ became abhorred 

 and despised alike. Then came the crisis. The English minister, in- 

 fluenced by the necessity of checking the rise of a popish parliament, 

 which that of Ireland must inevitably have become, in name, as well as 

 in spirit, within a few years — a change, which would have been inevi- 

 tably followed by the revolt of Ireland, and its seizure by France or 

 Spain — determined to remove the legislature to England. 



The measure was wise, but the means were criminal. Yet, if pallia- 

 tion for the memdry of the minister who uses unhallowed means, is to 

 be found in the impossibility of adapting any other to the case, the 

 memory of Pitt may be vindicated in the purchase of the Irish legisla- 

 ture, by the fact, that to money alone that legislature was accessible. The 

 market was opened, and as every man had his price, the sale was expe- 

 ditiously completed. Some individuals were an honourable and rare 

 exception. They struggled for the independence of parliament, with 

 noble and powerful patriotism. They pointed out to the people the loss 

 of public spirit, the decay of national dignity, the calamitous privation 

 of a place of honourable exercise for the rising genius and virtue of the 

 country, the direct, and ruinous growth of popish faction which must 

 be created by the absence of aU that powerful and intelligent protes- 

 tantism naturally drawn off to England by the removal of their legisla- 

 ture. And those appeals, forcible, true, and made in the loftiest language 

 of feeling, must have triumphed, but for one misfortune. The people 

 were utterly sick of parliament. They had seen themselves trafficked 

 from hand to hand, till they could submit to be trafficked no more. 

 The idea of public principle had perished. The more a public man 

 professed, the more they pronounced him a place-hunter and a slave. 

 They were sick of the baseness, the knavery, and the hypocrisy of public 

 life ; and they refused to answer the appeals. Their parliamentary in- 

 dependence, which twenty years before, they had challenged from Eng- 

 land at the risk of a civil war, and which, ten years before, would have 

 put a sword into the hands of every man in the kingdom, to save the hem 

 of its robe from a presumptuous touch ; they suffered to be sacrificed, and 

 looked on the sacrifice as men look at the punishment of an incorrigible 

 criminal. From one end of Ireland to the other, there was not a hand 

 raised in its defence : there was scarcely a remonstrance. The public 

 feeling had so long been disgusted by the venality of parliament, that all 

 attachment was dead ; and in its place, had come a kind of vindictive 

 joy at the fall of the villainous race, who had turned the temple of the 

 Constitution into a den of thieves. The Irish parliament went down to 

 the grave, with none to write its epitaph. And by a chance, which 

 takes almost the shape of a judicial sentence on the character of its temp- 

 tation, its site was sold for a bank ; and the halls, which once echoed as 

 noble aspirations as ever issued from the lips of young liberty, before 

 they had degenerated into the foul accents of old corruption, now rings 

 with the traffic of the money-changers. 



This is not the place to point out the formidable lessons which 

 the crime and the punishment of the Irish legislature speak, for the 

 warning of nations. We may return to the subject. But we address 

 men capable of looking beyond the miserable triumphs by which public 

 faction gets the momentary superiority over public honour, when we 

 pronounce, that there is a special providence armed against legislative 

 corruption. The crimes of individuals are often repented of, and for- 



M.M. New Series.— yoi..\lll No. 43. C 



