No rulers on earth will permit any order of men to overturn established laws, whilst they have power to maintain their authority. Much less will the rulers of this kingdom change one tittle of the laws, on occasion of any violence committed by a set of men who could be mowed down as so many withered weeds, by one single regiment. They will listen to the complaints of the subject when preferred to them in a decent, humble, and becoming manner, and through a proper channel. But they will reserve to themselves the mode of redress, as well as the time for granting or refusing it. The multitude is too fickle and inconstant for governing itself. If it once strikes out of the path of subordination, tu mults, dissensions, and the most atrocious crimes must be the result; and in this state of convulsion, the man who com plained of grievances before, under the ruling powers, will feel heavier grievances from his neighbour, who, unrestrained by law, will become his murderer or oppressor. Your conduct justifies my remark; the man who earned his four-pence or five-pence a day, slept secure under the protection of the law, and in the neighbourhood of the magistrate. Now, by the Whiteboy rules, he must starve in his cottage for want of liberty to earn his bread in a distant parish, or rides the grey horse on a furze saddle, or to be buried to his chin in a torturing grave. How to conclude this letter I am at a loss: you have any regard for your lives, for your wives, for your children, for your fathers, or for your mothers, I conjure you in the name of God, to desist without any further delay. Lord Luttrell, who, to his eternal honour, has inquired into your complaints, is in possession of whatever is to be laid before the State of the nation, whose decision you should wait for, with that submission becoming subjects, and that prudence which should hinder you as men from running to your final destruction. Your cause could not be in worse hands than your own: therefore throw yourselves on the mercy of your rulers, and do not force them to forget, in the multitude of your offences, whatever may be the cause of your complaints. This plain, simple, and candid advice is now your last resource: if you reject it, you are undone; for you will not only have the laws and the army let loose on you, but all the nobility and gentry; all the wise, peaceable, and virtuous subjects, will consider you as public enemies, whose

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destruction is requisite for their own preservation. And as you are ignorant of the danger which threatens you, I request in your behalf, as a favour of the Printers throughout the kingdom, to copy this letter into their respective papers, and of the friends of humanity to make it as public as possible, by dispersing it amongst you. That it have on you the desired effect, is the wish of

Your's, &c.

A. O'LEARY.

Cork, Nov. 19, 1786.

REV. ARTHUR O'LEARY'S ADDRESS

To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the Parliament of Great Britain: to which is added, an account of Sir Henry Mildmay's Bill relative to Nuns.

MY LORDS,

WHEN I have the honour to address the most august Assembly on earth, and under the impression which injured honour must feel from an unmerited and horrid accusation that implies whatever can disgrace the human heart, and changes a Christian clergyman into an infernal being, even before he is stripped of the spoils of mortality, I cannot be ignorant of the delicacy of my situation, lest conscious, but defenceless rectitude should tempt me, even in the most agitated frame of mind, to make use of any unguarded word, which, though inadvertently, may give the slightest offence.

But in bringing the complaints of injured honour into the sanctuary of honour itself, I claim your Lordship's indulgence if I presume to introduce myself under the designation which points out my person and character, to such members of your illustrious body as I have not the honour of being known to.

I am a Catholic clergyman, a native of Ireland, well known in that kingdom for having inculcated loyalty to my Sovereign, and subordination to the laws, in the most critical times, by my writings, my sermons, and example. For the truth of this assertion I could refer to the speeches delivered

in the Irish House of Commons on a former occasion, and to the kingdom at large. Nor was my loyalty the effect of imperious necessity, or time-serving policy; for in France, where, in consequence of barbarous and Gothic laws, I was forced in my early days to seek for a small portion of that education which I had been refused in the land of my fathers, where the youth of Europe had been instructed gratis, in the time of Ireland's splendour. In France, where the Catholics. of Ireland had seminaries and convents, with full admission to all the degrees and honours of her Universities, I resisted every solicitation to enlist any of the subjects of these kingdoms in the French king's service, though I had then every opportunity, being appointed to superintend prisons and hospitals, during the wars of fifty-seven, &c. until about the arrival of the then Duke of Bedford in Paris. It was my interest to recommend myself to the favour of the people in power, and consequently, more my interest to become a courtier than a moralist. Saint Paul calls God to witness when he asserts the truth, I can do the same when I assert that conscience was the rule of my conduct; and, whatever the uninformed may think of my creed, I would not perjure myself for all the Crowns and Sceptres on earth.

Thus far I thought it incumbent on me to say something of myself, in order to shew that not a single feature in my character corresponds with the picture, of the exhibition whereof, I have such room to complain. I have taken the oath of allegiance to his Majesty with the rest of the Catholic clergy of Ireland; as then we are amenable to Government, and fulfil our part of the covenant, we think ourselves entitled to the protection of the laws both as to our persons and honour. Our persons have been hitherto secure from insult; how long they may be so is uncertain, if the public can believe that we answer the description given of us in a short publication to which the editor has prefixed the name of a very considerable person, who is presumed to know the state of Ireland, or who ought to know it better. For if our lineaments bear even the slightest resemblance to the portrait he is said to have drawn, we ought to be swept from society as serpents horrid to sight, and pests deadly to human nature

And as to honour, if what this publication sets forth, be true, we have by far less claim to it than the Cartouches, or Bagshots: for, the publication, after enlarging upon the civilization and other happy effects of the Union of Ireland with Great Britain, reckons, amongst others, the following remarkable one: It will entice the Clergy to more con⚫stant residence, by which means the pernicious influence of the vagrant Catholic Priest, who goes about selling ab'solution for felonies, and all sorts of crimes, even murder itself, would be lessened, and in a great measure done ' away.'

Horrid and barbarous accusation! which describes the Catholic Priests of Ireland as the most detestable of the human race, venders of sacrilege, profanation, murder, and felony; and their flocks as so many licensed criminals and patentees of guilt, in purchasing their absolutions for the perpetration of the most horrid deeds. The vagrant Catholic Priests selling absolutions for felonies, all sorts of crimes, even murder.

I am as great a friend to the Union, and have reconciled, I believe, as many to it, as the person to whom the publication is attributed. I am a friend to it from, as I imagined, a wellfounded expectation, that it will close the tumultuary scenes which have distracted my ill-fated country for ages; and make the natives, of every religious description, happy: a people united, not in a league against Great Britain, but united with her and amongst themselves in interest, prosperity, and power; by a free and equal participation of all benefits and advantages arising in the state, and by the removal of those jealousies which ever subsist between kingdoms or states, standing in the same relation to each other as England has stood hitherto with respect to Ireland-the one subordinate to the other, and governed by viceroys, and both but half united. Divisions, jealousies, and their concomitant evils, must be the natural consequence. Such was the state of Norway, with regard to Denmark, until united. Such was the state of Portugal with regard to Spain, and of Flanders with regard to Austria, until separated. such would be the state of Ireland with regard to England, until wedded together in the bands of a close and intimate

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union; or divorced from each other by a solemn irrevocable deed of separation. For the calamities of Ireland are not originally and radically owing to difference in religious opinions. The kingdoms and states above mentioned professed the same creed. There is nothing unsociable in the character of Irishmen, any more than in the character of Germans; amongst whom, in some places, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics, perform their respective worship, on Sundays, in the same church. Amidst such a multiplicity of penal laws, some of which persecuted the dead body to the grave, in forbidding, under certain penalties, to bury any Catholic in the ruins of an old abbey, though built ages before by his ancestors; no Catholic could scarce haye breathed outside the bars of a jail, had it not been for the liberality of our Protestant neighbours, who were too generous to enforce them. All the liberal-minded Protestants in Ireland are for the emancipation of the Catholics to this very day. And such as are under any bias now, would soon give up their prejudices, or rather, would never have indulged any, if the law had made no distinction.

Long before the magic sound of Protestant and Papist, like the Trojan trumpet, had given the signal to marshal them, as hostile armies against each other, on account of their creeds-an insiduous and destructive policy was at a loss how to divide the natives of Ireland, after they had sheathed the sword, and coalesced into one extensive and friendly family. It had not then the plea of difference of religion, for their religion was the same: nor the plea of interest, for it is the interest of the inhabitants of the same land to live in peace and harmony. At last it compassed, by playing on the passions, what it could not have effected by either religion or interest.

The Irish nobility and gentry of the Milesian race wore long beards, in which they gloried; the Government of that time got an act of parliament passed, called the Glib Act, whereby every Irish nobleman, of English or Norman extraction, was to forfeit the privileges of his original country if he did not shave the upper lip. Thus the warlike fools renewed the bloody contest, for the splitting of a hair, with as much fury as the two famous factions, in the reign of

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