the minds of the people towards that great object, and what encouragement they gave to all who should choose to exert themselves in your favor.  Their unwearied endeavors were not wholly without success, and the unthinking people in many places became ill-affected towards us on this account.  For the ministers proceeded in your affairs just as they did with regard to those of America.  They always represented you as a parcel of blockheads, without sense, or even feeling; that all your words were only the echo of faction here; and (as you have seen above) that you had not understanding enough to know that your trade was cramped by restrictive acts of the British Parliament, unless we had, for factious purposes, given you the information.  They were so far from giving the least intimation of the measures which have since taken place, that those who were supposed the best to know their intentions declared them impossible in the actual state of the two kingdoms, and spoke of nothing but an act of union, as the only way that could be found of giving freedom of trade to Ireland, consistently with the interests of this kingdom.  Even when the session opened, Lord North declared that he did not know what remedy to apply to a disease of the cause of which he was ignorant; and ministry not being then entirely resolved how far they should submit to your energy, they, by anticipation, set the above author or some of his associates to fill the newspapers with invectives against us, as distressing the minister by extravagant demands in favor of Ireland.

I need not inform you, that everything they asserted of the steps taken in Ireland, as the result of our machinations, was utterly false and groundless.  For myself, I seriously protest to you, that I neither wrote a word or received a line upon any matter relative to the trade of Ireland, or to the polities of it, from the beginning of the last session to the day that I was honored with your letter.  It would be an affront to the talents in the Irish Parliament to say one word more.

What was done in Ireland during that period, in and out of Parliament, never will be forgotten.  You raised an army new in its kind and adequate to its purposes.  It effected its end without its exertion.  It was not under the authority of law, most certainly, but it derived from an authority still higher; and as they say of faith, that it is not contrary to reason, but above it, so this army did not so much contradict the spirit of the law as supersede it.  What you did in the legislative body is above all praise.  By your proceeding with regard to the supplies, you revived the grand use and characteristic benefit of Parliament, which was on the point of being entirely lost amongst us.  These sentiments I never concealed, and never shall; and Mr. Fox expressed them with his usual power, when he spoke on the subject.