Representative British Orations Volume 4 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
History
Representative British Orations Volume 4 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
Speeches, addresses, etc., English
To carry on these persecutions, the viceroy chooses for his first
inquisitor the descendant of some Popish refugee--some man with an
hereditary hatred to Protestants; he is not the son of an Irishman,
this refugee inquisitor--no, for the fact is notorious that the Irish
refugee Papists were ever distinguished for their liberality, as well
as for their gallantry in the field and talent in the cabinet. This
inquisitor shall be, gentlemen, a descendant from one of those English
Papists, who was the dupe or contriver of the Gunpowder Plot! With
such a chief inquisitor, can you conceive anything more calculated to
rouse you to agony than the solemn mockery of your trial? This chief
inquisitor begins by influencing the judges out of court; he proceeds
to inquire out fit men for his interior tribunal, which, for brevity,
we will call a jury. He selects his juries from the most violent of
the Popish Orangemen of the city, and procures a conviction against
law and common sense, and without evidence. Have you followed me,
gentlemen? Do you enter into the feelings of Protestants thus insulted,
thus oppressed, thus persecuted--their enemies and traducers promoted,
and encouraged, and richly rewarded--their friends discountenanced and
displaced--their persons unprotected, and their characters assailed
by hired calumniators--their blood shed with impunity--their revenues
parsimoniously spared to accumulate for the individual, wastefully
squandered for the state--the emblems of discord, the war-cry of
disunion, sanctioned by the highest authority, and Justice herself
converted from an impartial arbitrator into a frightful partisan?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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