18 THE IRISH PEOPLE. 



For instance, General Montagu Matthew said in the 

 House of Commons : " The person who should say 

 so (against the Irish people), did not deserve to live, 

 but to die by the hand of the common executioner. 

 The right hon. gentleman talks of atrocities ! Never 

 had more atrocities been committed by the most 

 desperate despot than by the British Government. 

 I would tell Earl Camden that if ever there was 

 tyranny in any country, it was in Ireland under the 

 administration of that noble lord." Being called to 

 order, Matthew said : " Then I must give up the 

 year 1798, the scalping, and all the rest."* 



(5.) In 1805, General Lord Hutchinson of Alex- 

 andria, an Irishman, who, with soldiers chiefly Irish- 

 men, drove the French army out of Egypt, said in 

 the House of Lords : " Assertions have been made 

 in this House to calumniate and traduce the char- 

 acter of my Catholic countrymen, which, if uttered 

 anywhere else, I should not hesitate to pronounce 

 most unfounded calumnies. They are as brave, as 

 generous a people as any on earth ; their virtues are 

 peculiarly their own, their faults are not the faults 

 of their nature, but of those laws under whose bane- 

 ful operation they have suffered. ... I call 

 upon the noble lord to retract an assertion so un- 



* Speech in House of Commons, Jan. 31, 1809. 



