"Ireland disclaimed any connection with Great Britain, she instantly put herself in a condition of defence against her foreign enemies; oppressed at one time by England, and at length reduced to a state of calamity and distress experienced by no other country that ever existed, unless visited by war or famine, and perceiving that all prospect of justice or relief was in a manner finally closed, and that she must perish or work out her own salvation, she united as one man to rescue herself from that approaching destruction which seemed to await her. The people instantly armed themselves and the numbers armed soon increased to upwards of 40,000 men, and were daily augmenting. This most formidable body was not composed of mercenaries, who had little or no interest in the issue, but of the nobility, gentry, merchants, citizens, and respectable yeomanry, men able and willing to devote their time and part of their property to the defence of the whole and the protection and security of their country. The Government had been abdicated and the people resumed the powers vested in it, and in doing so were fully authorised by every principle of the Constitution, and every motive of self-preservation, and whenever they should again delegate their inherent power they firmly and wisely determined to have it so regulated and placed upon so large and liberal a basis that they should not be liable to suffer from the same oppression in time to come, nor feel the fatal effects and complicated evils of maladministration, of calamity without hope of redress, or of iron-handed power without protection. "To prove that these were the declared and real sentiments of the whole Irish nation, he should not dwell upon this or that particular circumstance, upon the resolutions of country or town meetings, upon the language of the associations, upon the general prevalent spirit of all descriptions of men of all religions; matters of this kind, however true or manifest, were subject to and might admit of controversy. He would solely confine himself to a passage contained in a State paper, he meant the Address of both Houses of the Irish Parliament, declaring that nothing but the granting the kingdom a 'free trade' could save it from certain ruin. Here was the united voice of the country conveyed through its proper constitutional organs, both Houses of Parliament, to his Majesty, against which there was but one dissentient voice in the Houses, not a second, he believed, in the whole kingdom. Church of England men and Roman Catholics, Dissenters, and sections of all denominations, Whigs and Tories, if any such were to be found in Ireland, placemen, pensioners, and county gentlemen, Englishmen by birth, in short, every man in and out of the House, except the single instance mentioned, had all united in a single opinion that nothing would relieve the country short of a free trade."[132]