politics, to seek for rights, or talk of constitution--would not the spirit of the nation rise against their insolence, and make them feel how much more valuable _he_ is who promotes the comfort and welfare of society by commerce or by labour, than _he_ who lives upon the spoil of the community in something _worse_ than idleness? It was this arrogance in the Castle servants, the result of their conscious strength in corruption, that scouted with contempt and insult, out of the Irish House of Commons in 1795, the petition of three millions of Catholics, fully and impartially represented. Was not this an aggression of administration against the people? And yet the partisans of that administration--nay, the first mover in it, has had the confidence to assert, that the discontents and tumults of the people _preceded_ the measures of which they complain. Englishmen will determine, whether the Irish nation, consisting principally of Catholics, had or had not reason to be disgusted with the administration of the government under which they lived, when by the influence of that administration not only their wishes were not consulted, not only their general sense disregarded, but even their supplications spurned without a hearing from that body which professed to be, and which ought to be, their representatives. If it be granted that such conduct in the popular representation of a nation was calculated to excite discontent and destroy confidence, what followed that transaction must have had a much more powerful tendency to alienate the affection of the people, and produce those direful consequences which are now boldly said to have arisen unprovoked. When the Irish Catholics perceived, from the manner in which their petition for the elective franchise was treated, that in the Irish House of Commons they were not to look for friends, they resorted to the Throne. The supplications which had met only with contumely when addressed to the Irish Commons, was received with favour by a British King, acting with the advice of a British Cabinet. In the next session, the speech from the throne recommended to the Irish Parliament to take into their consideration the situation of the King's Catholic subjects. No sooner was this hint received from the British Cabinet, than those very men, who but last year pledged their lives and fortunes to perpetuate the exclusion of the Irish Catholics from the privileges of freemen, because to admit them to share those privileges would be a subversion of the constitution and establishment, surrendered that opinion with as much promptness and facility as they had shewn violence and rancour in taking it up. Without any petition from the Catholics, without any change of circumstances, except the declaration of the will of the British Cabinet, that privilege which was last year refused with so much harshness and disdain, was this year spontaneously conceded!