complaints of the natives would be heard on this side of the water with any other sentiments than those of contempt and indignation.  Their cries served only to augment their torture.  Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of an excellent contrivance.  Indeed, in England, the double name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it would be hard to say which singly was the most odious,) shut up the hearts of every one against them.  Whilst that temper prevailed, (and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory,) every measure was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man, and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself.

However, as the English in Ireland began to be domiciliated, they began also to recollect that they had a country.  The English interest, at first by faint and almost insensible degrees, but at length openly and avowedly, became an independent Irish interest,—­full as independent as it could ever have been if it had continued in the persons of the native Irish; and it was maintained with more skill and more consistency than probably it would have been in theirs.  With their views, the Anglo-Irish changed their maxims:  it was necessary to demonstrate to the whole people that there was something, at least, of a common interest, combined with the independency, which was to become the object of common exertions.  The mildness of government produced the first relaxation towards the Irish; the necessities, and, in part, too, the temper that predominated at this great change, produced the second and the most important of these relaxations.  English government and Irish legislature felt jointly the propriety of this measure.  The Irish Parliament and nation became independent.

The true revolution to you, that which most intrinsically and substantially resembled the English Revolution of 1688, was the Irish Revolution of 1782.  The Irish Parliament of 1782 bore little resemblance to that which sat in that kingdom after the period of the first of these revolutions.  It bore a much nearer resemblance to that which sat under King James.  The change of the Parliament in 1782 from the character of the Parliament which, as a token of its indignation, had burned all the journals indiscriminately of the former Parliament in the Council-Chamber, was very visible.  The address of King William’s Parliament, the Parliament which assembled after the Revolution, amongst other causes of complaint (many of them sufficiently just) complains of the repeal by their predecessors of Poynings’s law,—­no absolute idol with the Parliament of 1782.