private fund,
the families from whom the revenue is taken are indemnified, and an
equitable balance between the government and the subject is established.
But if a great body of the people who contribute to this state lottery
are excluded from all the prizes, the stopping the circulation with
regard to them may be a most cruel hardship, amounting in effect to
being double and treble taxed; and it will be felt as such to the very
quick, by all the families, high and low, of those hundreds of thousands
who are denied their chance in the returned fruits of their own
industry. This is the thing meant by those who look upon the public
revenue only as a spoil, and will naturally wish to have as few as
possible concerned in the division of the booty. If a state should be so
unhappy as to think it cannot subsist without such a barbarous
proscription, the persons so proscribed ought to be indemnified by the
remission of a large part of their taxes, by an immunity from the
offices of public burden, and by an exemption from being pressed into
any military or naval service.

Common sense and common justice dictate this at least, as some sort of
compensation to a people for their slavery. How many families are
incapable of existing, if the little offices of the revenue and little
military commissions are denied them! To deny them at home, and to make
the happiness of acquiring some of them somewhere else felony or high
treason, is a piece of cruelty, in which, till very lately, I did not
suppose this age capable of persisting. Formerly a similarity of
religion made a sort of country for a man in some quarter or other. A
refugee for religion was a protected character. Now the reception is
cold indeed; and therefore, as the asylum abroad is destroyed, the
hardship at home is doubled. This hardship is the more intolerable
because the professions are shut up. The Church is so of course. Much is
to be said on that subject, in regard to them, and to the Protestant
Dissenters. But that is a chapter by itself. I am sure I wish well to
that Church, and think its ministers among the very best citizens of
your country. However, such as it is, a great walk in life is forbidden
ground to seventeen hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Ireland. Why
are they excluded from the law? Do not they expend money in their suits?
Why may not they indemnify themselves, by profiting, in the persons of
some, for the losses incurred by others? Why may not the