From that time Ireland has ever had a general Parliament, as she had before a partial Parliament.  You changed the people; you altered the religion; but you never touched the form or the vital substance of free government in that kingdom.  You deposed kings; [Footnote:  47] you restored them; you altered the succession to theirs, as well as to your own Crown; but you never altered their Constitution, the principle of which was respected by usurpation, restored with the restoration of monarchy, and established, I trust, forever, by the glorious Revolution.  This has made Ireland the great and flourishing kingdom that it is, and, from a disgrace and a burthen intolerable to this nation, has rendered her a principal part of our strength and ornament.  This country cannot be said to have ever formally taxed her.  The irregular things done in the confusion of mighty troubles and on the hinge of great revolutions, even if all were done that is said to have been done, form no example.  If they have any effect in argument, they make an exception to prove the rule.  None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them at such times were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity.  By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that kingdom.  Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority.  Turn your eyes to those popular grants from whence all your great supplies are come, and learn to respect that only source of public wealth in the British Empire.

My next example is Wales.  This country was said to be reduced by Henry the Third.  It was said more truly to be so by Edward the First.  But though then conquered, it was not looked upon as any part of the realm of England.  Its old Constitution, whatever that might have been, was destroyed, and no good one was substituted in its place.  The care of that tract was put into the hands of Lords Marchers [Footnote:  48]—­a form of government of a very singular kind; a strange heterogeneous monster, something between hostility and government; perhaps it has a sort of resemblance, according to the modes of those terms, to that of Commander-in-chief at present, to whom all civil power is granted as secondary.  The manners of the Welsh nation followed the genius of the government.  The people were ferocious, restive, savage, and uncultivated; sometimes composed, never pacified.  Wales, within itself, was in perpetual disorder, and it kept the frontier of England in perpetual alarm.  Benefits from it to the state there were none.  Wales was only known to England by incursion and invasion.