This is, indeed, to speak plain, though to speak nothing very new.  The same thing has been said in all times and in all languages.  The language of tyranny has been invariable:  “The general good is inconsistent with my personal safety.”  Justice and liberty seem so alarming to these gentlemen, that they are not ashamed even to slander their own titles, to calumniate and call in doubt their right to their own estates, and to consider themselves as novel disseizors, usurpers, and intruders, rather than lose a pretext for becoming oppressors of their fellow-citizens, whom they (not I) choose to describe themselves as having robbed.

Instead of putting themselves in this odious point of light, one would think they would wish to let Time draw his oblivious veil over the unpleasant modes by which lordships and demesnes have been acquired in theirs, and almost in all other countries upon earth.  It might be imagined, that, when the sufferer (if a sufferer exists) had forgot the wrong, they would be pleased to forget it too,—­that they would permit the sacred name of possession to stand in the place of the melancholy and unpleasant title of grantees of confiscation, which, though firm and valid in law, surely merits the name that a great Roman jurist gave to a title at least as valid in his nation as confiscation would be either in his or in ours:  Tristis et luctuosa successio.

Such is the situation of every man who comes in upon the ruin of another; his succeeding, under this circumstance, is tristis et luctuosa successio.  If it had been the fate of any gentleman to profit by the confiscation of his neighbor, one would think he would be more disposed to give him a valuable interest under him in his land, or to allow him a pension, as I understand one worthy person has done, without fear or apprehension that his benevolence to a ruined family would be construed into a recognition of the forfeited title.  The public of England, the other day, acted in this manner towards Lord Newburgh, a Catholic.  Though the estate had been vested by law in the greatest of the public charities, they have given him a pension from his confiscation.  They have gone further in other cases.  On the last rebellion, in 1745, in Scotland, several forfeitures were incurred.  They had been disposed of by Parliament to certain laudable uses.  Parliament reversed the method which they had adopted in Lord Newburgh’s case, and in my opinion did better:  they gave the forfeited estates to the successors of the forfeiting proprietors, chargeable in part with the uses.  Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human creature in Ireland?  It is bounty, it is charity,—­wise bounty, and politic charity; but no man can claim it as a right.  Here no such thing is claimed as right, or begged as charity.  The demand has an object as distant from all considerations of this sort as any two extremes can be.  The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the fruits of their industry.  They call for no man’s estate; they desire not to be dispossessed of their own.