I shall ask you to consider these statutes carefully; to remember that they were compiled under the direction of a crown prince, and confirmed by the men who had the entire government of Ireland in their hands.  The first was an open and gross insult to the natives, who were treated as too utterly beneath their English rulers to admit of their entering into social relations with them.  The settlers who had lived some time in the country, were ascertaining every day that its inhabitants were not savages, and that they considered the ties of honour which bound them to those whom they “fostered,” or for whom they stood sponsors, as of the most sacred description.  Their own safety and interests, if not common feelings of humanity and affection, led them to form these connexions, which were now so ruthlessly denounced.  But it led them also to treat the Irish with more respect, and placed them on some sort of social equality with themselves; and this was clearly a crime in the eyes of those who governed the country.  The second clause had a similar object, and insulted the deepest feelings of the Celt, by condemning his language, which he loved almost as his life, and his customs, which had been handed down to him by an ancestry which the Anglo-Norman nobles might themselves have envied.  The third enactment was an outrage upon common justice.  It has been already shown that the Irish were refused the benefit of the English law; you will now see that their own law was forbidden.  Some of these laws are at present open to public inspection, and show that the compilers, who wrote immediately after the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, and the original lawgivers, who existed many centuries before the Christian era, were by no means deficient in forensic abilities.  Whatever feuds the Irish may have had between their clans, there is every reason to believe that justice was impartially administered long before the English settlement.  That it was not so administered after that settlement, the preceding history, nay, even the very subject under discussion, sufficiently proves.

The fourth clause might have been beneficial to the Irish, if it had been strictly observed.  The other enactments were observed; but this, which required the consent of the Government to make war on the natives, was allowed to remain a dead letter.  In any case, the Government would seldom have refused any permission which might help to lessen the number of the “Irish enemy.”

The last enactments, or series of enactments, were simply barbarous.  The Irish were an agricultural nation; therefore they were not permitted to be agriculturists.  Their wealth consisted solely in their flocks; therefore every obstacle should be placed to their increase.  So much for the poor.  The higher classes had formerly some hope of advancement if they chose to enter the English service in the army; to do so now they must renounce their Irish name, their language, and their customs.  They might also have chosen the ecclesiastical state; from this now they are completely barred.