circulation with regard to them may be a most cruel hardship, amounting in effect to being double and treble taxed; and it will be felt as such to the very quick, by all the families, high and low, of those hundreds of thousands who are denied their chance in the returned fruits of their own industry.  This is the thing meant by those who look upon the public revenue only as a spoil, and will naturally wish to have as few as possible concerned in the division of the booty.  If a state should be so unhappy as to think it cannot subsist without such a barbarous proscription, the persons so proscribed ought to be indemnified by the remission of a large part of their taxes, by an immunity from the offices of public burden, and by an exemption from being pressed into any military or naval service.

Common sense and common justice dictate this at least, as some sort of compensation to a people for their slavery.  How many families are incapable of existing, if the little offices of the revenue and little military commissions are denied them!  To deny them at home, and to make the happiness of acquiring some of them somewhere else felony or high treason, is a piece of cruelty, in which, till very lately, I did not suppose this age capable of persisting.  Formerly a similarity of religion made a sort of country for a man in some quarter or other.  A refugee for religion was a protected character.  Now the reception is cold indeed; and therefore, as the asylum abroad is destroyed, the hardship at home is doubled.  This hardship is the more intolerable because the professions are shut up.  The Church is so of course.  Much is to be said on that subject, in regard to them, and to the Protestant Dissenters.  But that is a chapter by itself.  I am sure I wish well to that Church, and think its ministers among the very best citizens of your country.  However, such as it is, a great walk in life is forbidden ground to seventeen hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Ireland.  Why are they excluded from the law?  Do not they expend money in their suits?  Why may not they indemnify themselves, by profiting, in the persons of some, for the losses incurred by others?  Why may not they have persons of confidence, whom they may, if they please, employ in the agency of their affairs?  The exclusion from the law, from grand juries, from sheriffships and under-sheriffships, as well as from freedom in any corporation, may subject them to dreadful hardships, as it may exclude them wholly from all that is beneficial and expose them to all that is mischievous in a trial by jury.  This was manifestly within my own observation, for I was three times in Ireland from the year 1760 to the year 1767, where I had sufficient means of information concerning the inhuman proceedings (among which were many cruel murders, besides an infinity of outrages and oppressions unknown before in a civilized age) which prevailed during that period, in consequence of a pretended conspiracy among Roman Catholics against the king’s government.  I could dilate upon the mischiefs that may happen, from those which have happened, upon this head of disqualification, if it were at all necessary.