In considering the effect which the extensive and secret meetings of the United Irishmen produced on the dispositions of the lower people it is not necessary to ascertain whether the designs of that body were or were not treasonable. It is sufficient that were they precisely limited to their professed objects, emancipation and reform, the effect of them on the mass of the public by whom they were constituted must be adverse to the system which administration had adopted, and which they now began to force on the nation by means the most unjustifiable. If this statement of facts, which I have now submitted to the English nation, as demonstrative that the Irish administration were themselves the authors of those enormities which they have since made a pretext for introducing fire and sword through the country--if this statement, I say, be true, and I defy any part of it to be disproved, their guilt and the emptiness of the pretences by which they have endeavoured to screen it, are incontrovertible: What was the next measure of administration? The Insurrection Act. The outrages which commenced in Armagh, and had been but too successfully, though faintly, imitated in several parts of the country, administration now affected to consider as incurable by any of the ordinary powers with which the law invested the executive authority. A law was therefore propounded and adopted, by which any district which the magistrates of it might think proper to declare in a state of disturbance, or in immediate danger of becoming so, (phrases so vague that it required but little artifice to make them applicable at that time to any county in the kingdom,) was put into such a state of regimen, that any individual magistrate might on his own authority, without trial or proof, seize the person of any inhabitant and send him to serve on board his Majesty's fleet--_i. e._ transport him for life. In such districts the privileges of the constitution with respect to liberty, and I may add, life, were completely suspended; for whether under pretended authority derived from this act, or from the superabundant zeal of the military protectors of the public peace, who were employed to assist in the execution of it, numbers fell, either by being shot at their own doors, or by the newly-invented process of strangulation, adopted to procure confession of crimes which perhaps had never been committed, or the accusation of others, whose innocence might have made it impossible to convict them by other evidence.