His liberal administration encouraged them, therefore, to send him a clear statement of the barbarous outrages committed by such men as Smellpriest and Sir Robert Whitecraft, not only against his Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, but against many loyal Protestant magistrates, and other Protestants of distinction and property, merely because they were supposed to entertain a natural sympathy for their persecuted fellow-subjects and fellow-countrymen. They said that the conduct of those men and of the Government that had countenanced and encouraged them had destroyed the prosperity of the country by interrupting and annulling all bonafide commercial transactions between, Protestants and Catholics. That those men had not only transgressed the instructions they received, from his predecessor, but all those laws that go to the security of life and property. That they were guilty of several cruel and atrocious murders, arsons, and false imprisonments, for which they were never brought to account; and that, in fine, they were steeped in crime and blood, because they knew that his predecessor, ignorant, perhaps, of the extent of their guilt, threw his shield over them, and held them irresponsible to the laws for those savage outrages. They then stated that, in their humble judgment, a mere relaxation in the operation of the severe and penal laws against Catholics would not be an act of sufficient atonement to them for all they had greviously suffered; that to overlook, or connive at, or protect those great criminals would be at variance, not only with all principles of justice, but with the spirit of the British Constitution itself, which never recognizes, much less encourages, a wicked and deliberate violation of its own laws. That the present was a critical moment, which demanded great judgment and equal humanity in the administration of the laws in Ireland. A rebellion was successfully progressing in Scotland, and it appeared to them that not only common justice but sound policy ought to prompt the Government to attract and conciliate the Catholic population of Ireland by allowing them to participate in the benefits of the Constitution, which hitherto existed not for them, thousands of whom, finding their country but a bed of thorns, might, from a mere sense of relief, or, what was more to be dreaded, a spirit of natural vengeance, flock to the standard of the Pretender. His excellency, already aware of the startling but just demand which had been made by the French Ambassador, for the national insult by Whitecraft to his country, was himself startled and shocked by the atrocities of those blood-stained delinquents. His reply, however, was brief, but to the purpose.