And, in the same manner, the Protestant masters of Ireland, while ostentatiously professing the political doctrines of Locke and Sidney, held that a people who spoke the Celtic tongue and heard mass could have no concern in those doctrines.  Molyneux questioned the supremacy of the English legislature.  Swift assailed, with the keenest ridicule and invective, every part of the system of government.  Lucas disquieted the administration of Lord Harrington.  Boyle overthrew the administration of the Duke of Dorset.  But neither Molyneux nor Swift, neither Lucas nor Boyle, ever thought of appealing to the native population.  They would as soon have thought of appealing to the swine.142 At a later period Henry Flood excited the dominant class to demand a Parliamentary reform, and to use even revolutionary means for the purpose of obtaining that reform.  But neither he, nor those who looked up to him as their chief, and who went close to the verge of treason at his bidding, would consent to admit the subject class to the smallest share of political power.  The virtuous and accomplished Charlemont, a Whig of the Whigs, passed a long life in contending for what he called the freedom of his country.  But he voted against the law which gave the elective franchise to Roman Catholic freeholders; and he died fixed in the opinion that the Parliament House ought to be kept pure from Roman Catholic members.  Indeed, during the century which followed the Revolution, the inclination of an English Protestant to trample on the Irishry was generally proportioned to the zeal which he professed for political liberty in the abstract.  If he uttered any expression of compassion for the majority oppressed by the minority, he might be safely set down as a bigoted Tory and High Churchman.143

All this time hatred, kept down by fear, festered in the hearts of the children of the soil.  They were still the same people that had sprung to arms in 1641 at the call of O’Neill, and in 1689 at the call of Tyrconnel.  To them every festival instituted by the State was a day of mourning, and every public trophy set up by the State was a memorial of shame.  We have never known, and can but faintly conceive, the feelings of a nation doomed to see constantly in all its public places the monuments of its subjugation.  Such monuments every where met the eye of the Irish Roman Catholics.  In front of the Senate House of their country, they saw the statue of their conqueror.  If they entered, they saw the walls tapestried with the defeats of their fathers.  At length, after a hundred years of servitude, endured without one vigorous or combined struggle for emancipation, the French revolution awakened a wild hope in the bosoms of the oppressed.  Men who had inherited all the pretensions and all the passions of the Parliament which James had held at the Kings Inns could not hear unmoved of the downfall of a wealthy established Church, of the flight of a splendid aristocracy, of the confiscation