Without entering into a more minute detail of the disgusting enormities or the sufferings to which this measure gave birth, I may safely refer it to the judgement of men accustomed to enjoy the uninterrupted blessings of British law and liberty, whether the infliction of this measure on the people of Ireland was not of itself enough to aggravate feelings already irritated into discontent the most alarming. I do not mean surely to justify assassination or treason, but I appeal to men who have the feelings of freemen, whether to see a father, a brother, or a son, fall, perhaps innocently, under the bayonet of a military executioner, or transported for life from his helpless family and nearest connections—it may be without guilt, because the punishment was inflicted without trial—may not in some degree account for, though it cannot justify, the shocking crimes which have, since the introduction of that measure, been committed by individuals in Ireland? A magistrate who exerts himself in carrying this law into effect, and who, in obedience to the will of the legislature, sends numbers of his countrymen from the soil in which they drew breath, and the connections which make life dear to them, merely because he suspects their loyalty, does that which, being legal, ought not to induce on him either odium or punishment; but while human nature shall continue to be composed of its present materials, there will be found men among the people over whom he exerts such authority, whose vindictive passions will be apt to mark him as their victim. In many deplorable instances has this been verified in Ireland. The Insurrection Act was adopted to prevent such enormities; unhappily it but encreased, greatly encreased, the black catalogue.
I ask unprejudiced men, whether these measures, carried into execution against a people who from the recent acquisition of independence felt much of the pride and sensibility of freedom, were not most likely to be attended with the consequences which have followed? What then, I ask, must have been the effect of that measure, at which freedom and justice feels still more abhorrence—a legal indemnity for all crimes committed against the people, under colour of preserving the peace? Good heavens! was it not enough that a law was passed which left the subjects' liberty and person at the mercy of the magistrates—but must the military or civil tyrant be protected by law against law, in the perpetration of acts which even by the spirit of that act would be illegal and oppressive? The first Bill of Indemnity Was designed to protect my Lord Carhampton, who had played the part of a self-created Dictator in Ireland. What the particular measures pursued by his Lordship were, I shall not enumerate. They are known, and I believe will be remembered by both countries. He is indemnified for his zeal; and his measures, instead of quieting, have been unfortunately found to have produced a contrary effect. From that time to the present, Bills of Indemnity have become an established part of the system of government in Ireland; so that he who can contrive means to cover the most malicious and oppressive crimes by the easy pretext of securing the public peace, may rest as firmly on an act to indemnify him in the succeeding session, as the public creditor may depend on the passing of the money bills.
In enumerating these successive steps which have been taken in Ireland, professedly to tranquillize the country, but which have operated only to render it outrageous, I might have mentioned the appointment and the recall of my Lord Fitzwilliam. But in speaking to the people of England it were superfluous to dwell on that event; for with the circumstances of that, they, as well as the people of Ireland, are acquainted. I shall therefore content myself with saying, that of the many irritating measures which have goaded Ireland, the recall of my Lord Fitzwilliam was the most mischievously efficacious. With that nobleman, Hope fled from the country. What has since followed has been the counsel of Despair. By that event it was placed beyond doubt, that the Cabinets of the two countries formed a junction against reform—against the restoration of the constitution to Ireland—and against a mitigation of the coercive system. If treason have spread widely through the country—if the friends of the French system have become numerous, it must be since that insulting act of the British Cabinet told the people, that if they felt the pressure of present evils, or looked for a further extension of constitutional rights, their hope must be turned to another quarter than to the influence of the British connection.
By the operation of the measures which I have now described, the Irish people and the Irish administration were put at issue. The system to which the Castle had resorted to silence murmur, had produced outrage—the measures which they took to punish outrage had created conspiracy, assassination, and, in many instances, treason. Throughout the whole process of discontent, I have shewed that administration were aggressors, and that the irregularities which have followed were but the reaction of an high and irritable spirit in the people, compressed by coercion, which left no vent to its feelings but in acts of private or public violence.
At this point the administration found it necessary to pause. The measures which they had already tried to smother the discontents of the people, and to repress those violent and illegal consequences of it, had not only proved ineffectual, but had aggravated, to a most alarming height, the mischiefs which they were sottishly expected to remedy. In almost every part of the country the most extreme disorder prevailed. It was not now a Volunteer Convention, consisting of men of known loyalty and great stake in the country, meeting to petition for reform—it was not now a Catholic Convention sitting in Dublin, pursuing open and constitutional measures to obtain elective franchise, or a full admission to the privileges of the constitution—it was not, I say, such bodies as these that administration had to cope with. They had put down those. Other more numerous and more dangerous difficulties were now to be encountered. The populace of the country was now organized, and an imperium in imperio formed, which, from its privacy and the numbers of which it consisted, was truly alarming. The professed objects of this society, the most singular which perhaps had ever been formed in any country, still continued what they originally were—Reform and Emancipation. But papers were found which were supposed to prove, that their designs were more dangerous and more extensive; and a letter from a Mr. Tone, which clearly expressed a treasonable opinion respecting a separation of the two countries was taken as full evidence that this was the sentiment of the society at large, consisting, as was believed, of not less than 600,000 men. Whatever might be their real designs, it was certain, that the conduct of the Orange-men of Armagh had been successfully imitated by the peasantry in many parts of Ireland. The plunder of arms was carried on systematically; the quantity taken was known to be considerable; and in the proclaimed districts several magistrates who had been active in transporting suspected persons, &c. &c. had been assassinated.
In this critical moment, the best and wisest men in Ireland, gentlemen possessed of the most extensive property in the country, and at the same time of character above the slightest imputation of disaffection or loyalty, urged on administration the necessity of changing that system which had been found to produce such horrible effects. They urged, that the great body of the nation was loyal—that even of the United Irishmen the greater part wished only for the admission of the Catholics and reform—and that to concede these would throw such a weight into the scale of government as would effectually tranquillize the country. Administration, however, took up the contrary opinion, and decided on a continuation of coercive measures. They pretended, that the people of Ireland were rebels, and that with rebels conciliation should not be tried. They assumed, in the first place, that all the United Irishmen were traitors—in the second, that that society comprehended the great body of the people, or that those who were not of that body approved heartily of all the measures which had been carried on for some years back by the Irish Cabinet. No account was made of that great and respectable class of men who, while they looked with detestation on those acts of insubordination, of assassination, and treason, which had followed the adoption of the present system, contemplated with the most unqualified reprobation that system itself. Determined, therefore, to scourge the nation out of that ill temper into which the scourge had driven it, what step did administration fix on? They send a military force under General Lake to the province of Ulster, and enjoin him to act at his discretion for disarming the freemen of the North, and enforcing content and tranquillity at the point of the bayonet!
It is not necessary to waste much reasoning on this measure. The constitution prescribes the interposition of the sword only in cases of open insurrection or rebellion. If the province of Ulster was in that state, what indignation must not the two countries feel at the wicked pertinacity of the Irish Cabinet in a system which led to that issue? If it were not in rebellion, what punishment could be too great for those who resorted without necessity to that last and dreadful remedy—a military force vested with discretionary powers, for disorders properly within the cognizance of the civil magistrate? But the administration justify themselves by the plea, that the proceedings of these United Irishmen were too subtle and cautious to be met by the ordinary exertions of the civil power, though they were not yet in open rebellion. They must take the praise, therefore, of having created a new species of opposition to established government, hitherto unknown, by directing, without intermission, the force of the state not against open violence, but against political principle; by warring, not with men whose aim was anarchy and plunder, but men skilled in, and zealous for, the perfection of the representative system.
But I deny that Ulster was in such a state as to justify the measure that was then taken—for it was not in open and avowed rebellion, nor was the system of the disorderly people in that province either too subtle or too strong for an active magistracy, constitutionally aided by the military. The disturbances amounted to nothing more than the assemblage now and then of parties of people on the original principle of the Orange-men (who to the disgrace of legislature, have, in a certain place, more than once, been called the friends of the constitution,) breaking houses and plundering arms; and I contend, that with a proper force left always at the disposal and under the direction of active magistrates, those individual acts of outrage might have been prevented. The pretext, that the magistrates were terrified from acting by frequent assassination, is empty—courage is not exclusively the boast of the military in Ireland; and every country in which the Insurrection Act has been carried into operation has produced numbers of magistrates who dared to meet all the odium and all the danger which the execution of that unpopular act imposed on them.
Under this Proclamation, Gen. Lake deprived of arms not only the traiterous and the disaffected, but the loyal and most zealous friends of the constitution. Where arms were expected and not found, a very new mode of trial was instituted. The suspected or accused person was suspended by the neck until the process of strangulation was nearly completed. He was then let down, and if he was still pertinacious, the touchstone was again tried, until he either confessed or accused others. In other cases, it was ascertained what quantity of arms should be brought in by a certain village or district—if the full quantity could not be produced by the inhabitants, their habitations were reduced to ashes to detect the concealment. These seem to have been ordinary modes of proceeding under the military system; there were others more irregular and eccentric which the zeal of the soldiers frequently prompted them to indulge in.