know perfectly well that the Irish in 1641 pretended, at least, that they did not rise against the king: nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put upon their act. But full surely they rebelled against the authority of the Parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do. Admitting (I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in those of their children and their grandchildren, even to the fifth and sixth generations. Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that it must be avenged forever? Will it follow that it must be avenged on thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of those whom they can never trace, by the labors of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion against the Parliament of England? If, however, you could find out these pedigrees of guilt, I do not think the difference would be essential. History records many things which ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations which formerly inflamed the furious factions which had torn their country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and abominable things which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured, robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years after, to find some color for justifying them in the eternal proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people. to Let us come to a later period of those confiscations with the memory of which the gentlemen who triumph in the acts of 1782 are so much delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in 1688, and the English Parliament again put up sale the greatest part of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this rebellion, nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation. The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their feeble power. Be the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated sovereign, against a prince whom the Parlia ments of Ireland and Scotland had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them. In generous minds some small degree of compassion might be excited for an error, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a conqueror, quadam specie et similitudine pacis, not without a mistaken appearance of duty, and for which the guilty have suffered, by exile abroad and slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best calculators compute that Ireland lost two hundred thousand of her inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For, if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect, and who, far from trespassing on their liberties and properties, secured both them and the independence of their country in much the same manner that we have seen the same things done at the period of 1782,- I trust the last revolution in Ireland. That the Irish Parliament of King James did in some particulars, though feebly, imitate the rigor which had been used towards the Irish, is true enough. Blamable enough they were for what they had done, though under the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or counterconfiscations as long as I live. When they happen. by necessity, I shall think the necessity lamentable and odious: I shall think that anything done under it ought not to pass into precedent, or to be adopted by choice, or to produce any of those shocking retaliations which never suffer dissensions to subside. Least of all would I fix the transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodizing it in tyrannic government. If it were permitted to argue with power, might one not ask these gentlemen whether it would not be more natural, instead of wantonly mooting these questions concerning their property, as if it were an exercise in law, to found it on the solid rock of prescription, the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or in public jurisprudence?-a title in which not arbitrary insti tutions, but the eternal order of things, gives judg ment; a title which is not the creature, but the master, of positive law; a title which, though not fixed in its term, is rooted in its principle in the law of Nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property: for all property in soil will always be traced back to that source, and will rest there. The miserable natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an hundred are tormented with quite other cares, and are bowed down to labor for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding with antiquaries for titles of centuries ago to the estates of the great lords and squires for whom they labor. But if they were thinking of the titles which gentlemen labor to beat into their heads, where can they bottom their own claims, but in a presumption and a proof that these lands had at some time been possessed by their ancestors? These gentlemen (for they have lawyers amongst them) know as well as I that in England we have had always a prescription or limitation, as all nations have, against each other. The crown was excepted; but that exception is destroyed, and we have lately established a sixty years' possession as against the crown. All titles terminate in prescription,-in which (differently from Time in the fabulous instances) the son devours the father, and the last prescription eats up all the former. |