Our Constitution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the Constitution. In our Constitution there has always been a difference between _a franchise_ and _an office_, and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the _subject_, as _a subject_, and not as _a member of the governing part of the state_. The policy of government has considered them as things very different; for, whilst Parliament excluded by the test acts (and for a while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in England) Protestant Dissenters from all civil and military employments, they _never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament or sitting in either House_: a point I state, not as approving or condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in reason. I will not here examine whether the principles of the British [the Irish] Constitution be wise or not. I must assume that they are, and that those who partake the franchises which make it partake of a benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications inherent in the Constitution that gives them) are excluded, not from _the state_, but from _the British Constitution_. They cannot by any possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so bravely made by those who possess the privilege, that the best blood in their veins ought to be shed to preserve their share in it,--they, the disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think themselves in an _happy_ state, to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential advantages. The popular part of the Constitution must be to them by far the most odious part of it. To them it is not an _actual_, and, if possible, still less a _virtual_ representation. It is, indeed, the direct contrary. It is power unlimited placed in the hands of _an adverse_ description _because it is an adverse description_. And if they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, or tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigor.