And, if we admit the general rule to be that the English parliament is competent to legislate for colonies planted by English subjects, what reason was there for considering the case of the colony in Ireland as an exception?  For it is to be observed that the whole question was between the mother country and the colony.  The aboriginal inhabitants, more than five sixths of the population, had no more interest in the matter than the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be emancipated from all external control.  They were no more represented in the parliament which sate at Dublin than in the parliament which sate at Westminster.  They had less to dread from legislation at Westminster than from legislation at Dublin.  They were, indeed, likely to obtain but a very scanty measure of justice from the English Tories, a more scanty measure still from the English Whigs; but the most acrimonious English Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of hatred, fear and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian who dwelt among them.8 For the Irishry Molyneux, though boasting that he was the champion of liberty, though professing to have learned his political principles from Locke’s writings, and though confidently expecting Locke’s applause, asked nothing but a more cruel and more hopeless slavery.  What he claimed was that, as respected the colony to which he belonged, England should forego rights which she has exercised and is still exercising over every other colony that she has ever planted.  And what reason could be given for making such a distinction?  No colony had owed so much to England.  No colony stood in such need of the support of England.  Twice, within the memory of men then living, the natives had attempted to throw off the alien yoke; twice the intruders had been in imminent danger of extirpation; twice England had come to the rescue, and had put down the Celtic population under the feet of her own progeny.  Millions of English money had been expended in the struggle.  English blood had flowed at the Boyne and at Athlone, at Aghrim and at Limerick.  The graves of thousands of English soldiers had been dug in the pestilential morass of Dundalk.  It was owing to the exertions and sacrifices of the English people that, from the basaltic pillars of Ulster to the lakes of Kerry, the Saxon settlers were trampling on the children of the soil.  The colony in Ireland was therefore emphatically a dependency; a dependency, not merely by the common law of the realm, but by the nature of things.  It was absurd to claim independence for a community which could not cease to be dependent without ceasing to exist.