the errors of parliamentary despots, or the silly noise of such persons as those who disturbed the late elections for Yorkshire, and other counties, by screaming "No Popery"-seeming to consider the freeholders assembled to constitute not a house of parliament but a house of convocation, and no man qualified to direct the councils of the nation, unless to the distribution of his money for bawling adherents he added a plenitude, and gave a pledge of intolerance to millions of suffering subjects.

When you and your party, whether dukes or proprietors of boroughs, threaten to "act for yourselves," in what interpretation, my Lord Duke, would you wish me to consider this expression? Is it requisite to remind your Grace that it was by disregarding "the will of the people," that the ancient noblesse of France involved themselves in irretrievable calamity, and deluged their country with blood? The Corinthian pillar of polished society was stranded from that soil on which it had been so proudly reared; and modern France is now comparatively a nation of forty-shilling freeholders.

It is true, my Lord Duke, if the sword be drawn Ireland may succumb. The English can I admit conquer as they have conquered-can massacre as they have massacred tribes of less powerful clans in Ireland; but when Ireland has succumbed, or if a foreign state tenders to her those bonds of amity which we foolishly renounce for the pride of conquest or the lust of persecution, will our gracious sovereign thank the Brunswick associations for the loss of the brightest jewel in his diadem?

The people of England have lived in harmony and love with their fellow-subjects of Ireland; they are indebted to them for blood spilt in their battles, of which the Irish in their own country reap no advantage-for honor acquired by their victories, which separated from Ireland England could never have obtained. Three-fourths of the Irish are disgusted or estranged in their affections from the mal-administration or temporising policy of those governments which preceded that in which the masterly mind of Canning, stimulated by the honorable feelings of a liberal heart, yielded conviction to the principles of his opponents.

Whilst the march of power fascinated your Grace, that of intellect directed the energies of that statesman to admit to his heart's friendship in the united esteem of his sovereign such men as a Lansdown and a Carlisle. But the change in January last restores Mr. Peel to power; and then your Grace quaintly expresses," Patriots rejoice at the anticipated appointment" of a military premier; and then your Grace fondly hoped, "liberalism and conciliation were put an end to."

Your Grace simply asks, "if we desert our God, will he not

desert us?" And is it to the God of mercy you appeal, because we hesitate to destroy our brethren for adherence to doctrines which in better times than the present our ancestors professed, and for the errors of which doctrines I trust that the great captain of the age, whom you accuse of "not daring to act of himself," will never dare to substitute blood and slaughter for the intellectual weapons of argument and conciliation ?

These few thoughts, written a few hours after the perusal of your letter to Lord Kenyon, will suffice till your lucubrations are replied to by abler pens than that of him, who has the honor to be, My Lord Duke,

With all possible personal respect,

Your Grace's obedient servant,

MARTIN STAPYLTON.

LORD NUGENT TO HIS CONSTITUENTS,

THE ELECTORS OF AYLESBURY.

LONDON:-1828.

Lilies, Oct. 17.

I

GENTLEMEN,

HAVE not been in the habit of wantonly obtruding on you any opinions of my own respecting the conduct of others on either local or general politics. My duty is limited to the laying my own public principles before you, and to the acting on them to the best of my power in parliament to which you have sent me; it is yours to form your own conclusions on the events that are passing round you, and to give effect to those conclusions by the means which the constitution has placed in your hands. You will also do me the justice to feel, that it is not by any act of mine that I am now forced to break that silence which many considerations have long conspired to impose on me.

On my return, after a short absence from my county and from England, I find that, during that interval, a new and extraordinary appeal has been made to you by the formation of a private society in our town, of a sort which, for some reasons, I should not have expected to see made at this time in Buckinghamshire. It is an appeal, not only against my own opinions on the subject of religious liberty, but also against that political tranquillity and neighborly spirit which I believe it to be the disposition of most of us, and I know it to be the duty of all, to endeavor to preserve throughout the utmost opposition of opinions on public matters. I am happy to find, what I might well have expected from the folly of the design, that the execution of it is in a fair course of failure. But the attempt having been made (with, however, little success or applause), for me to decline the earliest opportunity of meeting it, would be to shrink from the duty I owe you, and from the duty I owe to the peace of this part of the county in which I bear so deep an interest.

It is not my intention at this time to trouble you with any argument on the right or wrong of what is called the Catholic question. I have done so often enough already, and by all those public means which are open to us. My opinions on that question are

not changed; but, as far as they could be strengthened, they are strengthened. That question must now be left to work its own way with the English people, who are given to reflection, and fond of justice, wherever they do not allow prejudice and passion to guard the avenues of the public mind equally against reflection and justice. I would only lay before you fairly the alternative in which the government and people of this empire have been placed with reference to that question, by the operation of that very system of club-law, which it is attempted, now for the first time here, to graft on the good old stock of public opinion.

A short visit to Ireland, in the course of which I have endeavored, with as much impartiality as is compatible with strong preconceived opinions, to correct by observation any inaccurate notions into which I may have fallen, gives me more right than I should otherwise have had to state to you the effects which have been produced and matured there by that system. The body called the Catholic Association, but, in fact, containing a great number of Protestant members, derived its origin from the club spirit which had been cultivated by the Orange faction. The Orange faction was the cause of the Catholic Association, which, though late, caught the spirit, and the result is, that four-fifths of Ireland now look to no other government but that of the Association. It now governs four-fifths of Ireland, without the power of rewards or punishments, but simply and solely by impression. It has not only the power of excitement and organisation; for that is easily obtained with a people laboring under a sense of injury. It has not only the power, if its leaders were wild and wicked enough now to exert it, of raising four-fifths of Ireland in forty-eight hours to any act of combined violence; but it has shown that it possesses also the much greater power of controlling, quelling, and dissolving meetings of thousands by a word of advice. Is this a state of things that should continue? Is this a fit power to subsist under any well-regulated government? Certainly quite the reverse. But the government of Ireland is not a well-regulated government; for it has for many years been in the hands of clubs. The Orangemen had long monopolised all that the government could give to corruption to enjoy, or could permit to violence to extort. Of late the government has been in wiser and juster hands; never, I think, as far as one may judge from a very short experience, in wiser or juster than those of Lord Anglesey. But this abridgment of their power is not tolerated by the Orange clubs. In all ways, and in all places, and, I lament to say it, from under every garb, even the sacred and peaceful one of the Christian ministry, the Orangemen are now crying out for blood, and avowing their wish to see it flow. The Association has been successful in showing to

the Catholics that to do acts of violence would be to play the game of their adversaries. It has succeeded in putting the Catholics on their guard against the Orange spies, who are all over the south of Ireland in the guise of friends and Catholics, endeavoring to excite them to acts which would justify the calling in the troops. This triumph will not be given by the Catholics to the Orangemen. Meetings of a very dangerous sort (if not illegal, which I am not lawyer enough to determine), but meetings of many thousands of Catholics were held, a few weeks ago, in different parts of the south ;-not for purposes of violence, but for purposes out of which, however peaceable, violence might, by the arts of the Orangemen, at any moment have been made to arise. The Association saw this, and in forty-eight hours, by a mere address, every assembly of this sort in Ireland was dispersed, and its recurrence prevented. A week after followed the proclamation of the government. A mild and wise one, to the same effect as that of the Association by which the work of tranquillisation had been already done. Then what must I conclude? Do I approve of every act of the Association? No. Do I think it a fit form of government for Ireland? Far from it. But I think that it has arisen out of the club spirit of its adversaries. I think that it is now maintaining the public peace in Ireland, which no other power could effectually do. I think that, when justice shall have been done to Ireland, it should and would be dissolved instantly; but that, till then, it neither can effectually, nor ought.

From the remotest times of our occupation of Ireland to the present, we have not discovered the secret of governing that island; nor have we approached nearer to that desirable discovery by applying the club system. We have labored to bring Ireland to our established faith ;- we have not adapted our means well to that end. We began by dismantling their ancient churches. The consequence is, that Ireland is beset with monuments of her ancient religion, which form an appeal as melancholy and as exciting as can be imagined. Small open ruins, some with the marks of violence still on their walls, and all bearing tokens of systematic persecution, surrounded by burying-grounds also in decay, overgrown with rank grass, and open to the country. Yet these contain the tombs of some of the noblest names of Ireland -of men who have clung, and whose sons are still clinging, to the desire of laying their remains close by the insulted and violated graves of their forefathers. Records of a strange error in a proselyting government! But, to complete the picture, the eye of the. Catholic, while surveying these sad memorials of what his faith and his family have suffered from the Protestant, is met, at almost the same glance, by the neighboring new Protestant spire, every