he nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks
of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled, to say the
least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life;
while every franchise, every honor, every trust, every place, down to
the very lowest and least confidential, (besides whole professions,) is
reserved for the master caste.

Our Constitution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive
exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy
the Constitution. In our Constitution there has always been a difference
between _a franchise_ and _an office_, and between the capacity for the
one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the
_subject_, as _a subject_, and not as _a member of the governing part of
the state_. The policy of government has considered them as things very
different; for, whilst Parliament excluded by the test acts (and for a
while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in
England) Protestant Dissenters from all civil and military employments,
they _never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament or
sitting in either House_: a point I state, not as approving or
condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from
employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in
legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in reason.

I will not here examine whether the principles of the British [the
Irish] Constitution be wise or not. I must assume that they are, and
that those who partake the franchises which make it partake of a
benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications
inherent in the Constitution that gives them) are excluded, not from
_the state_, but from _the British Constitution_. They cannot by any
possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their
ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so
bravely made by those who possess the privilege, that the best blood in
their veins ought to be shed to preserve their share in it,--they, the
disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think themselves in an _happy_ state,
to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential
advantages. The popular part of the Constitution must be to them by far
the most odious part of it. To them it is not an _actual_, and, if
possible, still less a _virtual_ representation. It is, indeed, the
direct contrary. It is power un