Great Britain, finding the Anglo-Irish highly animated with a spirit which had indeed shown itself before, though with little energy and many interruptions, and therefore suffered a multitude of uniform precedents to be established against it, acted, in my opinion, with the greatest temperance and wisdom.  She saw that the disposition of the leading part of the nation would not permit them to act any longer the part of a garrison.  She saw that true policy did not require that they ever should have appeared in that character; or if it had done so formerly, the reasons had now ceased to operate.  She saw that the Irish of her race were resolved to build their Constitution and their politics upon another bottom.  With those things under her view, she instantly complied with the whole of your demands, without any reservation whatsoever.  She surrendered that boundless superiority, for the preservation of which, and the acquisition, she had supported the English colonies in Ireland for so long a time, and at so vast an expense (according to the standard of those ages) of her blood and treasure.

When we bring before us the matter which history affords for our selection, it is not improper to examine the spirit of the several precedents which are candidates for our choice.  Might it not be as well for your statesmen, on the other side of the water, to take an example from this latter and surely more conciliatory revolution, as a pattern for your conduct towards your own fellow-citizens, than from that of 1688, when a paramount sovereignty over both you and them was more loftily claimed and more sternly exerted than at any former or at any subsequent period?  Great Britain in 1782 rose above the vulgar ideas of policy, the ordinary jealousies of state, and all the sentiments of national pride and national ambition.  If she had been more disposed (than, I thank God for it, she was) to listen to the suggestions of passion than to the dictates of prudence, she might have urged the principles, the maxims, the policy, the practice of the Revolution, against the demands of the leading description in Ireland, with full as much plausibility and full as good a grace as any amongst them can possibly do against the supplications of so vast and extensive a description of their own people.

A good deal, too, if the spirit of domination and exclusion had prevailed in England, might have been excepted against some of the means then employed in Ireland, whilst her claims were in agitation.  They were at least as much out of ordinary course as those which are now objected against admitting your people to any of the benefits of an English Constitution.  Most certainly, neither with you nor here was any one ignorant of what was at that time said, written, and done.  But on all sides we separated the means from the end:  and we separated the cause of the moderate and rational from the ill-intentioned and seditious, which on such occasions are so frequently