t is changed; but
they who have their shop full of false weights and measures, and who
imagine that the adding or taking away the name of Protestant or
Papist, Guelph or Ghibelline, alters all the principles of equity,
policy, and prudence, leave us no common data upon which we can reason.
I therefore pass by all this, which on you will make no impression, to
come to what seems to be a serious consideration in your mind: I mean
the dread you express of "reviewing, for the purpose of altering, the
_principles of the Revolution_." This is an interesting topic, on which
I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the
ideas I have formed.

First, I cannot possibly confound in my mind all the things which were
done at the Revolution with the _principles_ of the Revolution. As in
most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the
time, well or ill understood, from passion or from vengeance, which were
not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most
direct contradiction to them. I shall not think that the _deprivation of
some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest
in the Constitution, in and to which they were born_, was a thing
conformable to the _declared principles_ of the Revolution. This I am
sure is true relatively to England (where the operation of these
_anti-principles_ comparatively were of little extent); and some of our
late laws, in repealing acts made immediately after the Revolution,
admit that some things then done were not done in the true spirit of the
Revolution. But the Revolution operated differently in England and
Ireland, in many, and these essential particulars. Supposing the
principles to have been altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the
application of those principles to very different objects the whole
spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed. In England it
was the struggle of the _great body_ of the people for the establishment
of their liberties, against the efforts of a very _small faction_, who
would have oppressed them. In Ireland it was the establishment of the
power of the smaller number, at the expense of the civil liberties and
properties of the far greater part, and at the expense of the political
liberties of the whole. It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but
a conquest: which is not to say a great deal in its favor. To insist on
everything done in Ireland at the Revolution wo