A History of the Penal Laws Against the Irish Catholics from 1689 to the Union

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1825 edition. Excerpt: ...from the revenues. We are excluded from every distinction, every privilege, every office, every emolument, every civil trust, every corporate right. We are excluded from the navy, from the army, from the magistrature, from the professions. We are excluded from the palladium of life, liberty, and property, the juries, and inquests of our country.--From what are we not excluded? We are excluded from the constitution. We stand a strange anomaly in the law; not acknowledged, not disavowed; not slaves, not freemen: an exception to the principles of jurisprudence; a prodigy in the system of civil institution'. We incur no small part of the penalties of a general outlawry, and a general excommunication. Disability meets us at every hour, and in every walk of life. It cramps our industry, it shackles our property, it depresses our genius, it debilitates our minds.'--Why are we disfranchised, and why are we degraded? Or rather, why do those evils afflict our country, of which we are no inconsiderable part? We most humbly and earnestly supplicate and implore Parliament to call tins' law of universal exclusion to a severe account, and now at last to demand of it, upon what principle it stands, of equity, of morality, of justice, or of policy. And, while we request this scrutiny into the law, we demand, also, the severest scrutiny into our principles, our actions, our words, and our thoughts. Wherein have we failed as loyal and affectionate subjects to the best of Sovereigns, or as sober, peaceable, and useful members of society? Where is that people who can offer the testimony of a hundred years' patient submission to a code of laws, of which no man living is now an advocate--without sedition, without murmur, without complaint? Our loyalty has...