"What would be the situation of every man who had written upon the subject of tithes? For as the right of the clergy to tithes is acknowledged to be founded in law, and as the papers and writers have argued against them, what would be the consequence? Who could tell how their conduct might be construed in a court of law? or whether they might not be adjudged guilty of felony? But I will not ask who would be guilty under such a law; but I will ask who would not be guilty?

"A perpetual mutiny-bill had been once the law of the land, and yet gentlemen both spoke and wrote against it as dangerous, unconstitutional, and beyond the power of parliament to sanction.

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Had this bill been then law, they would have all been guilty of felony, and suffer death. Who could tell in what manner the words tending to excite disturbance might be interpreted? The clause respecting the taking of arms, and ammunition, or money to purchase them, bears a similarity to the white-boy act; but the white-boy act was more guarded.

"Now look to the clause which prostrates places of public worship. I consider it as casting a stain of impiety on the whole nation, and enjoining the magistrates, to commit that very act of violence, which is punished with death in the peasantry.

"It is a revival of the penal laws, and that in the most dangerous and exceptionable part.-I call upon gentlemen to consider, that they had no charge against the catholics to warrant this measure to consider, that they had not so much as cause for suspicion of them-to consider, if they were a popish peasantry, they were actuated by no popish motive;--to consider, that public thanks had been returned to the principal person of the catholic religion in this country, for his manly exertions to maintain the public peace, and to protect the rights of the established clergy; and I think, if there be any thing sacred or binding in religion, it would operate successfully against the present measure; for it would cast a stigma on the protestant religion.

"I have heard of transgressors being dragged from the sanctuary, but I never heard of the sanctuary being demolished; it went so far as to hold out the laws as a sanction to sacrilege.If the Roman catholics were of a different religion, yet they have one common God and one common Saviour with gentlemen themselves; and surely the God of the protestant temple, was the God of the catholic temple.

"What then does the clause enact? that the magistrate shall pull down the temple of his God—and if it be rebuilt, and as often as it is rebuilt for three years, he shall again prostrate it, and so proceed in a repetition of his abominations, and thus stab the criminal through the sides of his God-a new idea indeed.But this was not all; the magistrate was to sell by auction the altar of the Divinity to pay for the sacrilege that had been committed on his house. By preventing the chapel from being erected, I contend that we must prohibit the exercise of religion for three years; and that to remedy disturbance, we resort to irreligion, and endeavour to establish it by act of parliament. A commission of the peace might fall into the hands of a clergyman, and this clause first occasion him to preclude the practice of religion for three years, then involve him in vile abominations, and afterwards he must preach peace upon earth and good will towards men. With regard to the clause respecting the obstruction to the collection of tithes, I do not know how far it may be proper to go into the question of tithes; I conceive it would not be proper at all, if not generally. But since the clergy have with such ability, shown their right to tithes, by ecclesiastical and civil law, and that a resistance to the collection of that property, under the laws, was improper, the house would find itself in a strange predicament for its own vote of agistment. If tithes were legal, the house by that vote certainly deprived the clergy of a great part of them.

"I wish to have the clergy supported; I think the dignity of the country requires it; but as to making new laws for the purpose, I think that part of another business. Perpetuity was another principle of the bill, and another objection to it. Would any man say that the coercion which might be necessary, from the turbulence of one period, would be requisite at all future times! Was it to be handed down an inheritance to posterity? Would they tell the provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Connaught, that they would reward their tranquillity in the same manner they did the turbulence in the south? Was it to descend from the fathers to the children, as a kind of original sin, and death and felony to be spread in every quarter? It was a fixed principle that the punishment should bear a proportion to the crime, but it was not attended to in the bill. Would any man say, that a man ought to be punished with death for writing, or influencing per.

sons, I will say, by threats or otherwise? I wish, if possible, to confine the operation of the bill to the offending counties, and contend, that if the bill is to pass in its present state (but that I believe to be impossible) I will venture to pronounce that it would be absolutely ineffectual; for the crime would be overshot, and the feelings of humanity would revolt at the punishment : it would indeed be the triumph of the criminal and the stigma of the laws. I desire to know, whether it is meant to press the bill, with all its clauses? whether it be intended to submit it to alteration?—If the former, I will oppose it in the first instance; if the latter should be acceded to I will vote for the committal."

46

PATRIOTIC SPEECH

OF

MR. EMMET,

AS DELIVERED AT THE SESSION HOUSE, DUBLIN
BEFORE LORD NORBURY.

MY LORDS-What have I to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me, according to law? I have nothing to say, that can alter your predetermination, nor that it will become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are here to pronounce, and I must abide by. But I have that to say, which interests me more than life, and which you have laboured, (as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this oppressed country,) to destroy. I have much to say why my reputation should be rescued from the load of false accusation and calumny which has been heaped upon it. I do not imagine that, seated where you are, your minds can be so free from impurity, as to receive the least impression from what I am going to utter-I have no hopes that I can anchor my character in the breast of a court constituted and trammelled as this is I only wish, and it is the utmost I expect, that your lordships may suffer it to float down your memories untainted by the foul breath of prejudice, until it finds some more hospitable harbor to shelter it from the storm by which it is at present buffeted. -Was I only to suffer death, after being adjudged guilty by your tribunal-I should bow in silence, and meet the fate that awaits me without a murmur: but the sentence of law which delivers my body to the executioner, will, through the ministry of that law, labour in its own vindication, to consign my character to obloquy-for there must be guilt somewhere: whether in the sentence of the court or in the catastrophe, posterity must

determine. A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune, and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated, but the difficulties of established prejudice :—the man dies, but his memory lives: that mine may not perish, that it may live in the respect of my countrymen, I seize upon this opportunity to vindicate myself from some of the charges alleged against me. When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port; when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field, in defence of their country and of virtue, this is my hope; I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me, while I look down with complacency on the destruction of that perfidious government, which upholds its domination by blasphemy of the Most High-which displays its power over man as over the beasts of the forest-which sets man upon his brother, and lifts his hand in the name of God against the throat of his fellow who believes or doubts a little more or a little less than the government standard-a government which is steeled to barbarity by the cries of the orphans and the tears of the widows which it has made.

[Here lord Norbury interrupted Mr. Emmet, saying, that the mean and wicked enthusiasts who felt as he did, were not equal to the accomplishment of their wild designs.]

-I appeal to the immaculate God-I swear by the throne of Heaven, before which I must shortly appear-by the blood of the murdered patriots who have gone before me-that my conduct has been through all this peril and all my purposes, governed only by the convictions which I have uttered, and by no other view, than that of their cure, and the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and that I confidently and assuredly hope, that, wild and chimerical as it may appear, there is still union and strength in Ireland to accomplish this noble enterprise. Of this I speak with the confidence of intimate knowledge, and with the consolation that appertains to that confidence. Think not, my lord, I say this for the petty gratification of giving you a transitory uneasiness; a man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie, will not hazard his character with posterity by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to