But this melancholy and invidious title is a favorite (and, like favorites, always of the least merit) with those who possess every other title upon earth along with it.  For this purpose they revive the bitter memory of every dissension which has torn to pieces their miserable country for ages.  After what has passed in 1782, one would not think that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible confiscatory and exterminatory periods.  They would not set men upon calling from the quiet sleep of death any Samuel, to ask him by what act of arbitrary monarchs, by what inquisitions of corrupted tribunals and tortured jurors, by what fictitious tenures invented to dispossess whole unoffending tribes and their chieftains.  They would not conjure up the ghosts from the ruins of castles and churches, to tell for what attempt to struggle for the independence of an Irish legislature, and to raise armies of volunteers without regular commissions from the crown in support of that independence, the estates of the old Irish nobility and gentry had been confiscated.  They would not wantonly call on those phantoms to tell by what English acts of Parliament, forced upon two reluctant kings, the lands of their country were put up to a mean and scandalous auction in every goldsmith’s shop in London, or chopped to pieces and out into rations, to pay the mercenary soldiery of a regicide usurper.  They would not be so fond of titles under Cromwell, who, if he avenged an Irish rebellion against the sovereign authority of the Parliament of England, had himself rebelled against the very Parliament whose sovereignty he asserted, full as much as the Irish nation, which he was sent to subdue and confiscate, could rebel against that Parliament, or could rebel against the king, against whom both he and the Parliament which he served, and which he betrayed, had both of them rebelled.

The gentlemen who hold the language of the day know perfectly well that the Irish in 1641 pretended, at least, that they did not rise against the king:  nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put upon their act.  But full surely they rebelled against the authority of the Parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do.  Admitting (I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in those of their children and their grandchildren, even to the fifth and sixth generations.  Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that it must be avenged forever?  Will it follow that it must be avenged on thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of those whom they can never trace, by the labors of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion against the Parliament of England?