I am sorry to find that pride and passion, and that sort of zeal for religion which never shows any wonderful heat but when it afflicts and mortifies our neighbor, will not let the ruling description perceive that the privilege for which your clients contend is very nearly as much for the benefit of those who refuse it as those who ask it.  I am not to examine into the charges that are daily made on the administration of Ireland.  I am not qualified to say how much in them is cold truth, and how much rhetorical exaggeration.  Allowing some foundation to the complaint, it is to no purpose that these people allege that their government is a job in its administration.  I am sure it is a job in its constitution; nor is it possible a scheme of polity, which, in total exclusion of the body of the community, confines (with little or no regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favored citizens the rights which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the persons who administer in that government to prefer their own particular, but well-understood, private interest to the false and ill-calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong to.  Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances.  I have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force by the native vigor of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and climate that it grows in.  But speaking of things in their ordinary course, in a country of monopoly there can be no patriotism.  There may be a party spirit, but public spirit there can be none.  As to a spirit of liberty, still less can it exist, or anything like it.  A liberty made up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a liberty made up of exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four fifths, perhaps, of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes In what does such liberty differ from the description of the most shocking kind of servitude?

But it will be said, in that country some people are free.  Why, this is the very description of despotism. Partial freedom is privilege and prerogative, and not liberty. Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle.  It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice.  It is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty license of some potent individual or some predominant faction.

If anything ought to be despotic in a country, it is its government; because there is no cause of constant operation to make its yoke unequal.  But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by its very essence, lean upon the prostrate description.  A constitution formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor of freedom.  It compels that power which ought, and