At this point I stop--for here the fate of Ireland comes to its crisis. This measure was in operation not three weeks, when the rebels, the traitors, or the people of Ireland, to the sorrow of every friend to peace, to the Irish name, and to the British connection, stood forth in opposition to the King's troops. The scene of blood is now opened. Ireland is wasting her vital strength in convulsion; and whether victory or defeat await them, humanity, loyalty, and patriotism must weep over the event! When I solicit the people of England attentively to consider that long train of harsh and hideous measures which I have now enumerated, and which have brought Ireland into this lamentable condition--when I call on them to examine with anxious care the motives in which they originated, and the end to which they lead--I call on them to attend to that in which they are deeply interested. In my mind they have been adopted but for one purpose--to raise on the broad basis of CORRUPT INFLUENCE a system of government, which, under the form of the British constitution, should stand independent of, and in opposition to, the sense of the nation. I rest this opinion on two grounds--The one is, because each successive measure taken up by administration to counteract the wishes of the people, carried in it features of despotism, which in a free country the necessity of the case could not call for. Every bill of pains and penalties to which they resorted involved and asserted a general and permanent principle, or gave the Executive a general and extraordinary power, inconsistent with the spirit of the constitution, though the occasions which gave rise to those measures were but partial or transient. I refer for instances to the Convention Act, the Insurrection Act, the Gunpowder Act, and the Press Bill, a measure which, in my enumeration of the violent steps taken by the Irish government, escaped me, though perhaps it is, of all the dreadful groupe, the most prominent and most fatal to liberty and the constitution.--The other reason on which my opinion rests is, because administration have persevered in that system without making any one effort to allay discontent or satisfy the moderate and loyal part of the community by the concession of any of those measures on which the heart of the nation was fixed--because they have gone on in opposition to the sense of the best men in the empire to force the people of Ireland, or the discontented part of it, into open and avowed rebellion, rather than try any means to prevent that catastrophe by conciliating measures--because this intention was avowed and gloried in[2]--and, finally, because from the outset of their career they have resorted to military coercion in every case where they could find, or create, the slightest pretence for the use of that dreadful engine.