taining his cause; and which, I trust to shew, are equally and absolutely untenable.

His first stand is on the Treaty of Limerick. "I look upon that Treaty," says the Hon. Baronet, "as the charter of those rights and privileges, of which the Roman Catholics have been since unjustly, not to say unlawfully, deprived.”—“ I again assert,” he repeated," that the whole people of Ireland are, by the Treaty of Limerick, entitled to the fullest participation in all the rights and privileges, civil and political, of the British Constitution." Sir, I have paid to the construction of this Treaty a most unprejudiced, though most anxious, attention. It deserves such attention from the House, not merely from the immense importance attached to it by the Hon. Baronet on this occasion, as indeed on two other occasions at least, when in this House he has urged it as a main foundation of the claims of the Roman Catholics, but from its having furnished, in later years, the most frequent and the most popular arguments to the Roman Catholics in their own association, and, above all, in their petitions to the House; the petitions of thousands, or, if you please, millions of our fellow-subjects. Still more it is entitled to attention, because, whether urged by few or by many, it involves the dearest of all national interests, the public faith.

Sir, I do not forget the immortal words of Roscoe on another occasion. "No advantage can justify the sacrifice of a principle; nor was a crime

ever necessary in the conduct of human affairs." I am sure, that if it be true in our local law, that nullum tempus occurrit regi; it is equally and immutably true in respect to general law, that nullum tempus occurrit fidei publice. I will not here inquire, with my honourable and learned friend, the Solicitor-General, referring to the wars between the two Roses, how far, by an entire change of circumstances, any treaty, or any law, may become obsolete. I hold the principle, that where the parties are in existence, capable of giving and receiving the objects intended, the public faith cannot die: "time alone destroyeth not an act of parliament," says a great legal authority; and it is for those who resist a claim founded on the national faith, to shew that the circumstances of the parties have honestly so changed, as to render it impossible to act upon it. I have made these observations to satisfy the Hon. Baronet, that I resist not the principle which he assumes: on the contrary, I admit it strongly ; while, at the same time, I deny as strongly the application of it to the facts of the present case. I will never allow an argument from expediency to overturn a claim of right; and if the Roman Catholics could fairly derive their present demands from the terms of the Treaty of Limerick, I would concede them, without reference to the consequences to any establishment, and to any other interests.

The Hon. Baronet, on a former occasion, answered an argument, of which, I am happy to say,

I never, except in that answer, heard'; viz. that the Irish in Limerick were rebels, and therefore had no claims under the treaty. The Hon. Baronet's own answer was most satisfactory: if the Irish were rebels, it was a very good reason for not making a treaty with them; but no reason for breaking it, after you had made it.

The position, then, Sir, which I am prepared to sustain, and which has been defended on a former occasion by my Right Hon. friend the Secretary of State for the Home Department, is this, that no advantage now withheld from the Roman Catholics, can be claimed under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick. Whatever rights, secured by that treaty, may, subsequently to its date, have been withdrawn, they have all in succession been long since restored; and nothing now remains to be claimed, which that treaty professed to guarantee. I may here incidentally remark, in reference to the prominent place which this treaty now occupies in the front of the Roman Catholics, that it was never, I think, brought forward at all till the year 1793, in any petition seeking the present objects: it was not so brought

I had forgotten the Sermon of Antony Dopping, Bishop of Meath, who is said to have disgraced the pulpit by preaching this doctrine; and to have been himself struck out of the Council for it, by King William. Harris's Wars, p. 214. I had also forgotten, that "to obviate this doctrine, the Bishop of Kildare mounted the pulpit the following Sunday, and shewed the obligation of keeping the public faith." See a good deal more in Plowden's Ireland, ii. 9, 10.

forward by Sir Theobald Butler, if I rightly recollect his argument. I know, indeed, that it was quoted in an address to Lord Halifax, I think in 1761. It was quoted also by Lord Taaffe, in 1766, but there, apparently, without the least allusion to the construction now put upon it; and, in short, though quoted, I believe, on another and much earlier occasion, I think in 17231; it was never used as an argument of right in respect to the matters now at issue, till more than one hundred years after the date of it. I cannot, however, omit noticing here, that, though desuetude does not in itself abrogate the sanctions of any public treaty, the hundred years' silence of the Irish Roman Catholics, as to the support which the Treaty of Limerick gives to their present demands, is a strong presumption that the parties most interested in those demands did not at that time regard that treaty as securing them.

I am unable to say how any treaty can be better explained than by the parties at the time the interpretation to be given by third persons, at any time, least of all by third in another age, persons and in another country, can never be binding, while there is any mode whatever of determining the intentions of the contracting parties on the spot, and at the time in question. Burnet, therefore, whose words the Honourable Baronet quotes,

66

they were also admitted to all the privileges of

1

See also Wogan's Letter to Swift. Plowden, ii. 14.

subjects, upon their taking the oaths of allegiance to their Majesties, without being bound to take the oath of supremacy," cannot be considered as an authority whose evidence ought to have much weight as to the construction of this treaty, since his history was not written till, I think, thirty years after the transactions in question; and, certainly, was not published till forty-three years after them, i. e. till 1734. I should say this, even if he had recited all the articles, and had reasoned upon them one by one: but when I find him condensing the substance into seven lines, I cannot but see, that though in life he was contemporary with the transaction, yet, as an author, he wrote from memory of a distant event, in which he had no personal interest to secure the accuracy of his recollections.

Before I enter into detail upon the treaty itself, the Honourable Baronet, the Member for Westminster, will not deny, in respect to the campaign which preceded it, that the army of King James was, in the summer of 1691, in no very favourable position. The language of King James himself, writing of course from the reports made to him by his generals, presents a deplorable picture of the condition of his people'. I am, however, as little entitled, or inclined to deny, that, on the other hand, the army of King William was much required abroad; and that the close of the war in

1

See his Memoirs, Life of James II. Vol. ii.