“The Irish see that their national independence is gone, without having recovered any single one of those advantages which they were taught to expect from the sacrifice.  All good things were to flow from the Union; they have none of them gained anything.  Every man’s pride is wounded by it; no man’s interest is promoted.  In the seventh year of that Union, four million Catholics, lured by all kinds of promises to yield up the separate dignity and sovereignty of their country, are forced to squabble with such a man as Mr. Spencer Perceval for five thousand pounds with which to educate their children in their own mode of worship; he, the same Mr. Spencer, having secured to his own Protestant self a reversionary portion of the public money amounting to four times that sum....  Our conduct to Ireland, during the whole of this war, has been that of a man who subscribes to hospitals, weeps at charity-sermons, carries out broth and blankets to beggars, and then comes home and beats his wife and children.  We have compassion for the victims of all other oppression and injustice, except our own.”

It is of no use for statesmen to ignore the Irish question.  It is much too urgent and too dangerous a topic to be long suppressed.—­

“A man may command his family to say nothing more about the stone, and surgical operations; but the ponderous malice still lies upon the nerve, and gets so big that the patient breaks his own law of silence, clamours for the knife, and expires under its late operation.  Believe me, you talk folly when you speak of suppressing the Irish question.  I wish to God that the case admitted of such a remedy ... but, if the wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be heard ere long in the madness of mobs, and the conflicts of armed men.”

In Letter V. Peter turns upon Abraham, who cannot believe that England will ever be ruined and conquered, and says:—­

“Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian Plymleys.  But the English are brave?  So were all these nations.  You might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but, without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or Parisian shopkeepers.  I do not say this to the disparagement of English officers:  they have had no means of acquiring experience.  But I do say it to create alarm.  We do not appear to me to be half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the most obvious means of self-defence.  As for the spirit of the peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English; and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of