nor virtue and patriotism enough to assist in removing them. The ingenuity of the people will be called forth; in the place of religious discord and its folly, a spirit of emulation will arise in arts, in commerce, and in manufactures; habits of sobriety and industry will gradually introduce themselves; the pride and haughtiness of wealth and station will be softened; a peasantry of bold and manly feelings, more disposed to labour, and less disposed to riot, will grow up; each rank in society will acquire the character and manners suited to it; an easy gradation, together with a connexion and sympathy, will be felt through all the walks of life, from the palace to the cottage: :- no man will be so independent as to presume to act the tyrant, and few will be so dependent as to be completely servile and abject. "In a system of this kind, where relations and dependencies are all ascertained and established, the duties which one man owes to another will be better practised than where all is disconnected and disjointed. Statesmen will cease to be intemperate, ferocious, and inquisitorial; and the obedience of the people will be prompt and cheerful, in proportion as their interests are consulted, their prejudices indulged, and their opinions respected, if not altogether satisfied. "To you, my lord, the merit of opening such fair and flattering prospects, in a great degree, belongs; and, as they increase and ripen, your glory, and the gratitude of your countrymen, will increase together. "THOMAS BRAUGHALL, Chairman. To which his Lordship was pleased to return the following answer; "Gentlemen, "I am truly thankful to you for your affectionate address. You have placed me in the situation in which I am most proud to stand, by connecting me with the exertions of my family; and you have touched the master feeling of my heart, by honouring that integrity, and those talents which are unhappily lost to your cause, and to that of the public. You state the opinions and conduct of my late father, upon the great question of your emancipation, truly as they were. — Amongst the various objects which engaged his attention during the course of a long parliamentary life, there was nothing which he considered so essential to the prosperity of Ireland, as the union of all her inhabitants. He had been taught, by his experience and observation, that the misfortunes of his country had proceeded from her political dissentions. He had, therefore, turned his attention to the absolute necessity of healing those animosities, and of repealing that fatal system of laws, in which he saw nothing but national calamity; in which he has been able to trace the decay of arts, agriculture, and manufactures; the ruin of your commerce; the extinguishment of the public mind; the oppression of the Catholic; the weakness of the Protestant-and the degradation of both. 66 Impressed with this conviction, he was the uniform and zealous assertor of your rights, for a period of more than thirty years. He has bequeathed to me his opinions and his example, and I cherish them as the most valued part of my inheritance. You have adopted my family, and myself, as your hereditary advocates. It is the post of honour, and we will not desert it. We will continue to support you in whatever situation you may be placed-unattracted by the fashion as unwarped by the prejudice of the moment. We will assert the justice of your claims, whether you are dignified again by royal recommendation, or driven a second time from the doors of the Parliament. "When I supported your bill in 1792, it was not for the privileges only which it conferred, but for the principle which it established, a growing principle, of legitimate claim on the one hand, and liberal concession on the other.' I would have freely given you every thing at that moment, for you know my principle has ever been general comprehension, It cannot be more my feeling now, than it has ever been since the claims of the Catholic body have begun to awaken the public mind. But, to those who resisted in the outset, or who hesitated as they advanced in the great work of your adoption into the state; to such, I would urge what they have given already, as the surest earnest to the Catholic of that which remains behind;-to them I would answer, that the victory of 1793, which gave you the franchise, has insured all you claim now, as included in the same political equity-as a link of the same great national chain. 'It is vain to imagine, that admission to the elective franchise does not draw with it the right of representation, for upon what ground can it be said, that men are fit to be electors, and unfit to be elected, and giving them a seat in one House, upon what principle can it be refused to them in the other. The next step to the offices of civil and military power inevitably follows; for it cannot be said, that men who are allowed to be qualified for legislation, are unfit to be trusted with the execution of those laws which they join in forming.' - "I adopt the argument of the ablest of your opponents, though I rejoice that we have effectually resisted the conclusion which he would have drawn and I support your complete emancipation now, as the necessary consequence of the privileges of 1793;-to crown that system of justice and of liberality, which has nearly united us into one people; — to strengthen the Protestant cause, by quieting the Catholic mind;-to shut up 'till time shall be no more, every angry discussion ;-to make every man, verily and indeed, a neighbour to his fellow citizen; and to secure to the state, the allegiance of every member of the community, by giving to all, those motives to action which influence all mankind, their own interest and happiness. "But we are told by those who would separate the body of your people from those who have led them on to the rank they now hold as regenerated members of a free state, that they are already in full possession of all that was interesting to the Catholic community; that this is the question of your aristocracy; and that the people feel that they have nothing embarked in the event of the contest. But shut your ears against such arguments as tend only to weaken and to disunite. I tell you, you are all interested alike, from the peer to the peasant. Give the enemies of your emancipation but the principle of one exclusion upon which to take their stand, and the whole fabric of your liberties will totter to its found ation. - "It is not, therefore, so much for the value of what remains to be given, which to the Protestant is nothing, as against the principle of the exception, which may be every thing to the Catholic. It is not only that your property and talents may be excluded from that parliament, to which you have regained your constitutional privilege of becoming electors; it is not only that your ancient nobility may not be thrust from the seats of their forefathers;-it is not the admission into the few excepted offices of the state for which you are contending at the present moment; it is for the security of all your acquisitions of the last seventeen years, within which auspicious period you have become freemen, and Ireland an independent nation. You are contending against that spirit of exclusion, which if you are not enabled to resist with reason and with effect in its fullest extent, you are entitled to no political capacity whatsothat spirit of exclusion which must be melted down in the acknowledged justice of your claims, opening wide the arms of the legislature to embrace all the members of the state, or it will rise against you in some more questionable shape; and the same principle may reclaim in other times your glorious acquisitions of 1793, which would now withhold the remnant of privilege that is left. ever "But, whatever shape it may assume I will speak to the troubled spirit in the firm tone of truth and of consistency. I will uphold the real interests of the Protestant community against the prejudices of the few-for we have seen a new light, and the mist of error is dissolving away apace. To the Catholic I need not preach patience and moderation, for I remember the merits and the sufferings of a century; -his dutiful obedience to the law-his affectionate loyalty to the King- and his experienced devotion to the constitution of his country. "But I anticipate your success. I see it in the justice of your claims-in the firmness and unamimity of the Catholic body in the zeal and the eloquence of those who are its conductors-in the general concurrence of your Protestant brethren in the distinguishing propensity of the royal mind to abrogate penalties, and to confer privileges upon all his subjects in the exigency of the times, and the necessity of uniting the nation in a moment awful as the present—in the energy of your great supporter-in those gigantic talents, before which resistance retires, and difficulties vanish into air in that enthusiasm which led us on to honour and independence that spirit of peace, which would conciliate all our jarring interests, and unite all our people. "DONOUGHMORE." On the 7th of November, 1797, Lord Donoughmore was created a Viscount, by the title of Viscount Suirdale. The noble lord's conduct in the rebellion of 1798 was above all praise. Intrepid and persevering in the discharge of what he felt to be his duty, while, by his presence and active exertions in Cork, he kept the riotous and rebellious of that city and neighbourhood in awe, he repressed and prevented many of those exercises of "vigour beyond the law," which the inflamed zeal of the partisans of government was then elsewhere daily exhibiting. During that reign of terror, Lord Donoughmore commanded the Cork legion; and his combined firmness and humanity gained him the admiration and esteem of all good men. On the 1st of January, 1800, Lord Donoughmore received his appointment as colonel in the army. On the 29th of December in the same year, he was advanced to the dignity of an earldom, “with special remainder to the heirs male of Christiana Baroness Donoughmore," and he was also elected one of the twenty-eight representative peers of Ireland, for life. On the 30th of October, 1805, he was appointed majorgeneral. In May 1806, Lord Donoughmore was sworn a privycounsellor, and was appointed joint postmaster-general in |