After the laws had disfranchised four-fifths of the population, all the emoluments of office, all the wealth of the richest church in the world, all the distinctions of power, all the pomp, circumstance, and advantages of dominion, fell into the lap of the favoured few. These men never wished to lessen the pretext of their gains; they never sought the conversion of their helots by any means that ever made proselytes to any cause. The domestic spoliation of the catholics was the share of the Irish protestants in this wholesale robbery. The spoliation of the Irish nation was the part of England in this boundless plunder: she took the whole trade, prosperity, and independence of Ireland, which the Irish protestants freely surrendered for the license to pillage and tyrannize at home. These wrongs inflicted and endured, begat mutual hatred and frequent collision, and will account for the little union among Irishmen, and the ferocity of character to be found in those districts where the adverse parties came oftenest into contact. This barter of a nation’s rights for the lucre of a faction, is what was called the protestant ascendancy in church and state. It was also called the British constitution. Against that impious combination of treachery within, and tyranny from without, the United Irishmen pointed their oath of union—“To forward a brotherhood of affection, a community of rights, an identity of interests, and a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion.” It was this oath that was prosecuted as a felony, and for which frequent victims were sent to the scaffold. Emmet did not live to behold the triumph of the catholic cause, that happy accomplishment of one of the great measures to which he devoted fortune and life. But he saw, or thought he saw, all the materials for a successful struggle for freedom, in the internal resources of his beloved Ireland. In his moments of social ease and retirement, he delighted to enumerate those resources. A writer who seems to have known him well, gives us the following conversation between Emmet and his friends while he was maturing his measures for the coming contest.