nation, and defeated; the blaze was extinguished, but the fire remained in the embers, ready to be communicated to every inflammable material which it could be by any means wafted to.

In every popular government, faction, in some degree, must exist; it is a disorder to which such governments are liable, and in such a government as that of the British empire, it is as it were the price which the subjects pay for the inestimable benefits it confers on them. The discontented may be reduced among persons of any rank or influence, to two classes; one is actuated by disappointed ambition and avarice, and this class is infinitely the most numerous. The other class is composed of Jacobins, the avowed enemies of all religion, disciples of Voltaire, Rousseau, &c.; they style themselves philosophers, and are perpetual projectors of new forms of government, in which, however, each has his own peculiar whimsical system; and they can agree in nothing save in their enmity to the establishment in church and state, and in their indefatigable exertions to subvert it. These two classes solicit the favour of the populace with the utmost assiduity, and submit to the most servile cultivation of popular prejudices. The object of the one is the acquisition of political power and riches, by procuring to itself the great offices of state, and the emoluments belonging to them; the ob

ject of the other is the overthrow of the constitution, and the substitution of some democratie. system, in which, they vainly imagine they shall be able to secure, for themselves, the most eminent stations, and the direction of public affairs.

The united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is, at present, disturbed by both classes, and they have for some time directed their operations, principally, to Ireland. That great limb of the British empire, when compared with the rest of the body, may be said to labour under disorder, and, emphatically, to be unhappy. The great cause of this disorder is, that a large proportion of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, the most ignorant, and consequently the most bigoted in Europe; their hostility to a Protestant British government, from the very tenets of their religion, is incurable. This enmity to all Protestant governments is innoxious in other European Protestant states, because such states are all despotic governments, in which the body of the people have but very little power or influence, and in which the number of Romanists bear but a small proportion to the bulk of the people; but in a popular Protestant state, Romanists become dangerous subjects in proportion to their numbers, rank, and property; their religion obliging them, as a point of faith, to deny the supremacy of the

state, (that is, the power of the state to bind its subjects by its own laws,) and compelling them to acknowledge and submit to the supremacy of a foreign tribunal. The Romanists in Ireland, on the very best calculation, do not, in number, amount to two-thirds of the people; as to property, they do not possess the fiftieth part. However, their number and enmity to the state attracted the attention of the two classes of malcontents in Great Britain; and they have both applied to them as auxiliaries to their designs; the first class expecting, in the present critical state of the British empire, that an insurrection in Ireland will embarrass, perhaps displace, the ministry, and give them an opportunity of occupying their employments, and succeeding to their power: the second class judging, that rebellion in Ireland will lead to popular commotion and disturbance in Great Britain, and tend strongly to accelerate and promote their scheme of total subversion of the establishment in church and state, and the substitution of a democratic republic. Both classes, however, saw plainly that all addresses to the Protestants of Ireland, from them, would be vain and ineffectual: they were firmly attached to the establishment in church and state, and to an indissoluble connexion with Great Britain; and never would be induced to join any scheme which, even in specu

lation, could be supposed to tend to bring either into danger.

The Romish superstition is of such a nature, that it is impossible to procure the hearty support of its votaries in Ireland otherwise than by engaging to erect it on the ruins of the Protestant establishment, which has subsisted in Ireland since the commencement of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the first act of uniformity having passed there in the second year of the reign of that Princess. The Irish Romanists commenced four desperate rebellions to overthrow that Protestant establishment; two in the reign of Elizabeth, one conducted by the Earl of Desmond, the other by the Earl of Tyrone; a third in the reign of Charles the First, and a fourth in that of William the Third. rebellions the Romanists conducted themselves with the utmost barbarity, and the nation was completely wasted: to these may be added a fifths Romish rebellion in the year 1798; which, for the short time it lasted, and the extent of its desolating rage, was eminently destructive, and attended with as much barbarity and cruelty as any of the former.

In all these

After the suppression of that fourth great and general rebellion of the Irish Romanists in the reign of William the Third, commenced, by theta, under pretence of supporting the abdi

cated popish monarch, King James the Second, (but really with the design of absolutely extirpating the Protestant religion in Ireland, and separating Ireland, for ever, from the crown of England), the parliament of Ireland found it absolutely necessary to frame and enact laws to prevent the recurrence of such dreadful concussions, which succeeded one another, at short intervals, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth; and at each explosion of the volcano reduced the country to the utmost distress and misery; the Irish Romanists constantly rebelling, when the nation, in any considerable degree, recovered from the desolation and havock of a preceding eruption. Their numbers constantly encouraged them to new and desperate efforts, and their superstition impelled them to the suppression of, what they deemed, a damnable heresy, by every mode of sanguinary violence, deceit, and treachery. Self preservation impelled the Irish parliament to adopt measures for their security, against the attacks of an irreclaimable ferocious enemy, formidable by numbers and situation, in the very heart of the country. The popery laws. enacted in Ireland in the reign of Queen Anne, owe their origin to a principle implanted, in the human heart, by the Almighty, to wit, that of self preservation; they were the effects, and not the causes, of Romish rebellions; they were not en