at kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no
other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority. Turn your
eyes to those popular grants from whence all your great supplies are
come, and learn to respect that only source of public wealth in the
British empire.

My next example is Wales. This country was said to be reduced by Henry
the Third. It was said more truly to be so by Edward the First. But
though then conquered, it was not looked upon as any part of the realm
of England. Its old Constitution, whatever that might have been, was
destroyed; and no good one was substituted in its place. The care of
that tract was put into the hands of Lords Marchers: a form of
government of a very singular kind; a strange, heterogeneous monster,
something between hostility and government: perhaps it has a sort of
resemblance, according to the modes of those times, to that of
commander-in-chief at present, to whom all civil power is granted as
secondary. The manners of the Welsh nation followed the genius of the
government: the people were ferocious, restive, savage, and
uncultivated; sometimes composed, never pacified. Wales, within itself,
was in perpetual disorder; and it kept the frontier of England in
perpetual alarm. Benefits from it to the state there were none. Wales
was only known to England by incursion and invasion.

Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. They
attempted to subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by all sorts of
rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of arms
into Wales, as you prohibit by proclamation (with something more of
doubt on the legality) the sending arms to America. They disarmed the
Welsh by statute, as you attempted (but still with more question on the
legality) to disarm New England by an instruction. They made an act to
drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have done (but
with more hardship) with regard to America. By another act, where one of
the parties was an Englishman, they ordained that his trial should be
always by English. They made acts to restrain trade, as you do; and they
prevented the Welsh from the use of fairs and markets, as you do the
Americans from fisheries and foreign ports. In short, when the
statute-book was not quite so much swelled as it is now, you find no
less than fifteen acts of penal regulation on the subject of Wales.

Here we rub our hands,--A fine body of precedents for t