what remedy to apply to a disease of the
cause of which he was ignorant; and ministry not being then entirely
resolved how far they should submit to your energy, they, by
anticipation, set the above author or some of his associates to fill the
newspapers with invectives against us, as distressing the minister by
extravagant demands in favor of Ireland.

I need not inform you, that everything they asserted of the steps taken
in Ireland, as the result of our machinations, was utterly false and
groundless. For myself, I seriously protest to you, that I neither wrote
a word or received a line upon any matter relative to the trade of
Ireland, or to the polities of it, from the beginning of the last
session to the day that I was honored with your letter. It would be an
affront to the talents in the Irish Parliament to say one word more.

What was done in Ireland during that period, in and out of Parliament,
never will be forgotten. You raised an army new in its kind and adequate
to its purposes. It effected its end without its exertion. It was not
under the authority of law, most certainly, but it derived from an
authority still higher; and as they say of faith, that it is not
contrary to reason, but above it, so this army did not so much
contradict the spirit of the law as supersede it. What you did in the
legislative body is above all praise. By your proceeding with regard to
the supplies, you revived the grand use and characteristic benefit of
Parliament, which was on the point of being entirely lost amongst us.
These sentiments I never concealed, and never shall; and Mr. Fox
expressed them with his usual power, when he spoke on the subject.

All this is very honorable to you. But in what light must we see it? How
are we to consider your armament without commission from the crown, when
some of the first people in _this_ kingdom have been refused arms, at
the time they did not only not reject, but solicited the king's
commissions? Here to arm and embody would be represented as little less
than high treason, if done on private authority: with you it receives
the thanks of a Privy Counsellor of Great Britain, who obeys the Irish
House of Lords in that point with pleasure, and is made Secretary of
State, the moment he lands here, for his reward. You shortened the
credit given to the crown to six months; you hung up the public credit
of your kingdom by a thread; you refused to raise any taxes, whilst you
confessed the public