Wherever men have had no means of legitimate redress, we have seen them become their own avengers, the worst government being always marked by the greatest commotions. If there be not an impartial administration of justice, the stiletto takes place of the jury, and for want of a government restricted and accountable in Ireland, insurrection and civil war were the resources of an exasperated people. Left without the protection of a national parliament, Ireland was always tyrannically ruled, the frame of society dislocated and broken, and her numerous insurrections were the throes of agonized nature. But from the moment the protestant reformers recognised the principle that no reform was practicable, efficacious, or just, which should not equally include Irishmen of every religious persuasion, the measure was feasible. It received the assent of the whole nation, save only the established church, and the other dependants of the British government. Its principle recommended itself to the common sense of mankind; and the authority of America proclaimed its benefits. In a short time its way was so far prepared by public opinion that even its interested opponents anticipated its final success. They determined, therefore, upon the desperate expedient of leaving no parliament in Ireland for reform to better. They hastened to buy from the borough-holders that which a truly Irish parliament would not sell—its own existence and the nation’s independence. They hoped to extinguish in the abolition of the parliament, every chance of peaceable and constitutional improvement. They conspired to transport it for life, mutilated and captive, into the British House; to imprison beyond sea, in the abyss of English supremacy, where its languishing, nerveless remains, doomed to live in a perpetual minority, could never more bring to its ill-fated country the blessings of liberty, good government, or commerce. By the measures of a legislative union, Ireland reverts again to the same wretched state as when bound by acts of the British parliament. On the misery of that state, the ablest men who ever advocated her cause, even other than United Irishmen, have exhausted eloquence and invective, and the brightest page in her history is the one which records the extorted renunciation of that usurped power and plenary right of self-government. The pitiful representation of Ireland in a foreign land can but little avail her for her own benefit. She is there in a minority of one to six. The six give the law to the one, and with that one they have nothing in common. They have other constituents, who are a different people, who have clashing interests, who have national antipathies and who may well feel contempt for the substitutes of that parliament that traitorously sold its country. Such are the legislators who have bound Ireland in fetters.