ainst them. Whilst that temper prevailed, (and it
prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory,) every measure
was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and
ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man,
and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages who were a disgrace to human
nature itself.

However, as the English in Ireland began to be domiciliated, they began
also to recollect that they had a country. The _English interest_, at
first by faint and almost insensible degrees, but at length openly and
avowedly, became an _independent Irish interest_,--full as independent
as it could ever have been if it had continued in the persons of the
native Irish; and it was maintained with more skill and more consistency
than probably it would have been in theirs. With their views, the
_Anglo-Irish_ changed their maxims: it was necessary to demonstrate to
the whole people that there was something, at least, of a common
interest, combined with the independency, which was to become the object
of common exertions. The mildness of government produced the first
relaxation towards the Irish; the necessities, and, in part, too, the
temper that predominated at this great change, produced the second and
the most important of these relaxations. English government and Irish
legislature felt jointly the propriety of this measure. The Irish
Parliament and nation became independent.

The true revolution to you, that which most intrinsically and
substantially resembled the English Revolution of 1688, was the Irish
Revolution of 1782. The Irish Parliament of 1782 bore little resemblance
to that which sat in that kingdom after the period of the first of these
revolutions. It bore a much nearer resemblance to that which sat under
King James. The change of the Parliament in 1782 from the character of
the Parliament which, as a token of its indignation, had burned all the
journals indiscriminately of the former Parliament in the
Council-Chamber, was very visible. The address of King William's
Parliament, the Parliament which assembled after the Revolution, amongst
other causes of complaint (many of them sufficiently just) complains of
the repeal by their predecessors of Poynings's law,--no absolute idol
with the Parliament of 1782.

Great Britain, finding the Anglo-Irish highly animated with a spirit
which had indeed shown itself before, though with little energy and many
interruptions, and the