was published, which must have been a
daily subject of conversation--as it certainly was of written
polemics--during those ten years; when we find this upper fountain so
obviously streaming into the thought of Molyneux, should we not
associate the parliament of 1689 with that of 1782, and place Nagle and
Rice and its other ruling spirits along with Flood and Grattan in our
gratitude?
Moreover, the lords and commons expressly repealed Poyning's law, and
passed a bill creating Irish Inns of Court, and abolishing the rules
for keeping terms in London. But the king rejected these. We are to
this day without this benefit which the senate of '89 tried to give us;
and the future advocates and judges of Ireland are hauled off to a
foreign and dissolute capital to go through an idle and expensive
ceremony, term after term, as an essential to being allowed to practise
in the courts of this their native kingdom.
The Act (c. 4.) for restoring the ancient gentry to their possessions,
we have already canvassed. It were monstrous to suppose the parliament
ought to have respected the thirty-eight years' usurpation of savage
invaders, and to have overlooked the rights of the national chieftains,
the plundered proprietors who lived, and whose families lived, to claim
their rights. The care with which purchasers and incumbrancers were to
be reprized we have already noticed; yet we cannot but repeat our
regret that the bill of the Lords (which left the adventurers of
Cromwell a moiety of their usurpations) did not pass.
Naturally related to this are the Acts, c. 24, for vesting attainted
absentees' goods in the King, and c. 30, attainting a number of
insurgents. We have already shown from King, that the Whigs had taken
good care of the two things forfeited--their chattels, which they had
sent to them, without opposition, during the month of March, and their
persons, which they put under the guard of the gallant insurgents of
Derry and Fermanagh, or in the keeping of William and the charity of
England. How poorly they were treated then in England may be guessed at
by the choice men of the impoverished defenders of Derry having been
left without money, aye, or even clothing or food in the streets of
London.
We heartily censure this Attainder Act. It was _the_ mistake of the
Irish Parliament. It bound up the hearts and interests of those who
were named in it, and of their children, in William's success. It could
not be enforced: the
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