The legislature of Ireland, like all legislatures, ought to frame its laws to suit the people and the circumstances of the country, and not any longer to make it their whole business to force the nature, the temper, and the inveterate habits of a nation to a conformity to speculative systems concerning any kind of laws.  Ireland has an established government, and a religion legally established, which are to be preserved.  It has a people who are to be preserved too, and to be led by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that government.  Ireland is a country under peculiar circumstances.  The people of Ireland are a very mixed people; and the quantities of the several ingredients in the mixture are very much disproportioned to each other.  Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of benevolent legislation? or are we not rather to provide for the several parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the heterogeneous nature of the mass?  Would not common reason and common honesty dictate to us the policy of regulating the people, in the several descriptions of which they are composed, according to the natural ranks and classes of an orderly civil society, under a common protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favorable at once to authority and to freedom,—­such as the British Constitution boasts to be, and such as it is to those who enjoy it?

You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which consequently does not answer to them any one purpose of a religious establishment.  This is a state of things which no man in his senses can call perfectly happy.  But it is the state of Ireland.  Two hundred years of experiment show it to be unalterable.  Many a fierce struggle has passed between the parties.  The result is, you cannot make the people Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government.  This is what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions know.  To-day the question is this:  Are we to make the best of this situation, which we cannot alter?  The question is:  Shall the condition of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burdens of two religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation,—­or shall it be aggravated, by stripping the people thus loaded of everything which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as to leave them naked of every sort of right and of every name of franchise, to outlaw them from the Constitution, and to cut off (perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to property, or any other qualification, from all connection with the popular representation, of the kingdom?