mistaken when it was too late. Henry, who knew but little of the principles, and still less of the true spirit of legislation, was unfit for the task of reforming a perverse nation. His stay in Ireland was short, and his embarrassments on the continent disabled him from executing the good he intended, and was capable of. Our people changed their condition from bad to worse: instead of protection they experienced the exercise of wanton and lawless power: instead of clement governors, pur. chased at the expense of exorbitant possessions, a set of freebooters, who denied the natives the benefit of English laws and of all law. Thus have the old natives been treated, and we are not to wonder if they endeavored to relieve themselves by insurrections. As far as the miserable state of anarchy established among them permitted, they sought and found some redress in resistance, For four hundred years they could find it by no other means; at least, by no means adequate to the ends of a secure establishment.

We should not forget that in course of time, when the great adventurers from the neighbouring isle found themselves firmly rooted in this, they began, in turn, to hate one another, and in consequence allied with their enemies, the Irish chieftains, for the reduction of their rivals. This coalition cemented by no cordiality, but calculated for present convenience, produced no good effect. They were united indeed on one common principle, that of shaking off all dependence on England; and they did, in fact, confine the English government to a pale of no considerable extent. The policy of the latter, consisted in dividing its enemies, by treating one party as rebels, to be received into mercy, the other as aliens to be cut off, without any. Insurrections were the consequence of this species of policy, and undoubtedly, the little happiness the people enjoyed, they owed to the sad expedient of insurrection alone.

It may be worth the while to consider, that this state of things was not owing to the hatred of one ecclesiastical party to another, but to the inhumanity of papists against men of the same persuasion with themselves. It shews how little the formal identity of religion can secure human race, against human violence, and that we often and fatally mistake, when we ascribe to difference of worship, disorders which take their full operation without any. Of religious conformity it can only be

said, that it includes a stronger tendency to civil quiet, than religious discord can; though examples may be produced now on the continent, of happiness under the latter situation of things, as we can produce many instances of misery under the other. But political philosophy (so to speak) has enlightened several countries on the continent, and the people feel no civil miseries, because they do not adopt the religion pointed out to them by their masters. To them, and to these masters, an active civil obedience is sufficient.

In the case of various religions (particularly in their first establishments) jealousies are natural, and will prevail. Zeal, backed by credulity, and stimulated by hatred, will not hesitate on tracing to any odious form of religion, the political crimes of its votaries. But zeal and credulity, however they may be casually in the right, are very unfair arbiters, and will be generally found in the wrong; in both cases, and in our own country, we will find sad examples of human malevolence, suitable to the opportunities of gratification. When the oppressors of Ireland were unable to draw any justification of their measures from a diversity of religion, they were obliged to charge on the peculiar perverseness of the nation, what they dared not charge to their spiritual doctrines: but arguments supported by appeals to national dispositions to virtue or vice, cannot impose long. Those drawn from difference in religion exhibit at fairer outside; because it is possible enough that religion, ill understood, may have terrible consequences on civil society, which ought therefore to be guarded against. But such consequences, bad as they may be, must surely cease, or operate less to public danger, whenever knowledge and legislative wisdom co-operate, to bring their causes under a closer examination, than they have hitherto undergone. If the causes should be found no other than mere fugitive opinions, which distress may graft on a fair stock, judgment will interpose, and separate an evil which is temporary, from a sound principle which is permanent. Religion, good or bad, (according to the president Montesquieu,) is the surest test we have for the probity of men; and should the votaries of the best, in some circumstances, torture the sacred text to defend ill-taken measures, particularly when they have very strong temptations to do so; it will not be difficult to reduce such men from civil error, te

civil obedience, because they can demonstrably be reclaimed to such obedience, even under the lashes of penal laws; as the case stands in Ireland, at present, with the papists, who are loyal to their king, and from a sense of religious duty, would be so even without experiencing the royal mercy, to which alone, not to the laws of their country, they owe their present quiet existence in these islands.

We do not think we have any disaffected papists at this day in Ireland. The number, at least must be very inconsiderable; but the smallest is an object of attention. Relatively to these, the detection of them will be easy, (for they have a scrupulous regard to oaths) from their refusal of a test of loyalty, and of an abjuration of every connexion and principle inconsistent with it. By such a trial, legislators may be enabled to separate (so to speak) the elect of government from the reprobate; but legislators must conquer their own pre-occupations first, before such a separation can be made, or even attempted.

In former time, in the heat of contentions for power and property, pre-occupations had a foundation: they were lucrative as well as natural; at this day they are neither lucrative nor natural. At this day surely, the transient effects of transient policy should cease, and if an union, on the tenets of religion cannot be obtained, yet an union on civil principles, and civil conduct may. Good governors and wise men will not object to such an union, though they may be tender of proposing it, till a majority is prepared for believing what it really is, an useful measure.

Our morals as men, our interests as subjects, require the reformation here hinted at; religion, consistent with civil order, should cease to be a civil crime, and punishment should not reach those who are guilty of no other. Until people, whose principles (superstitious or orthodox) are reconcileable to our civil establishment, are trusted with constitutional immunities, Ireland cannot be happy. Nay, the great landlords of the kingdom must be reduced to a state of real, and hereafter, undoubtedly to a state of feeling deficiency in their incomes, as the labouring and industrious (more than half the people) are rendered useless, and indeed, hurtful to the aggregate whole, by too many restraints. Laziness, dissatisfaction, and despondency, the offspring of insecurity, will generally prevail; nay,

the very industry of the people, thus punished, will be turned against the state. A flux monied property may be acquired, by a traffic in large herds of cattle, or in imports and exports of commodities, and the wealth acquired will find its way into remote lands, when no security can be found for it at home.This, it must be granted, is but a partial evil: The British empire will lose nothing; it will in fact gain by it, as an emigration from hence to cultivate unoccupied lands in North America, must contribute to the strength of government, and increase of revenue, in those parts especially, where the British legislature have given security of property, to protestants and papists indiscriminately..

At the period from whence the Author of the following Memoirs sets forward, it will be found, that spiritual hatred mixed itself with our former national seeds of dissention. The perverseness so long imputed to the Irish, as a people was no longer charged on their nature, but on their religion. Almost every moral, and civil duty, was then confined within the pale of an ecclesiastical party: every species of treachery was placed beyond it. Real crimes were disowned by one faction, imaginary crimes were imputed to another; and this state of things occasioned guilt on both sides, which in a different state, would undoubtedly be avoided. High as most of these crimes were, yet most were exaggerated, and the innocent suffered with the guilty. To complete the misery of the times, the gospel of peace was tortured to defend the measures, and sanctify the drunkenness of every governing, as well as every resisting set of men; and thus it fared in Ireland, in some time after the accession of queen Elizabeth to the throne.

Queen Elizabeth, whose reign began in the height of ecclesiastical rage, had admirable talents for government. To plant civil order in the place of that misrule which disgraced the three preceding reigns, was difficult. Her interest led her, and the success of her father and brother encouraged her, to change the religion then established in England. This she effected; but truth must oblige us to confess, that the new church was reared on the foundations of persecution, and that the violence so justly censured in queen Mary's reign was adopted as a justifiable measure in the present. The change was made by a quick act of legislative power, but without that moderation,

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which sound policy should direct in establishments of this nature. By the change, one party in the nation was ruined, another was provoked. Papists were occasionally punished without discrimination, and in the idea of party justice, this procedure appeared equitable. But the puritan protestant was punished also, and the clamour ran high among dissenters, that the old beast returned, with a change only of the rider, and of the habiliments. The party for a comprehensive reformation, grew popular and encreased every day in strength and numbers, as it increased in faction and enthusiasm. The new church, even in the act of extirpating the old, created to itself, enemies on all sides, and thus it happened that the system wove by civil policy, was in a great degree unravelled by the ecclesiastical.

In Ireland where statute laws prevailed, but within a narrow circle, the new spiritual ordinances made no progress; the minds of the Irish were even prepared against any spiritual change, and they were provoked by the violence of the palegovernors in 1540, when after great excesses in Dublin and Trim, they extended their rage to the town of Monaghan, plundering not only the monastery of the observants, but putting the guardian and friars to death. In the first years of ElizaBeth's reign, such bloody measures were wisely avoided on its commencement, the earl of Sussex appointed chief governor of Ireland, proceeded on a plan of moderation without the pale, and for some time within, where a majority still shewed themselves extremely averse to the new spiritual doctrines, established by parliament in England. The ruinous effects of a Brehom. government were long felt, and owned by the old inhabitants. A change to a better civil establishment was practicable and solicited for by them but they were strenuous for the retention of their religion; and tho' unanimous on no other principle of defence, they declared themselves unanimous in the defence of this. In treating therefore with the provincial Irish, lord Sussex confined himself to the reformation of civil government, chiefly without pressing any other upon them. This sound policy was of short continuance, and the people without the pale were exasperated, by the sudden measures taken against their brethren within. Contemporary writers are unani. mous in affirming, and the nature of the thing verifies the fact that the penal laws against the exercise of their religion, were