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unconcealed and audacious prostitution of its members, that it is a perfect representation of its people. The administration of justice, the palladium of liberty, flowing from the same impure source, is equally infected. The subordinate civil officers prostitute their consciences, and betray the sacred and sovereign trust of judicial authority, by compromising, or conniving at felonies, and committing to prison a poor man who shall resent, with opprobrious language, the insult and tyranny of cruel and avaricious landlords, whose dissipation, libertinism, and defective intellect incapable of knowing fear, under the specious names of liberality and courage, tear the bread from the famished mouth of the peasant, and render him so wretched, that he might emigrate to Turkey, and there be blessed and receive from the equitable administration of an honest despot, a happiness which the unprincipled administration of liberty refused.*

The state of this country teaches an instructive lesson to all mankind, and shows that the mind must be enlightened, and the heart humanized before any form of association can procure public happiness. The mind of this country is in such a manner deprived of a providential reflection, that instead of avoiding, it rushes on approaching and future danger; and individuals frequently oppose the whole body of the nation in the collection of taxes, recovery of rents, and execution of laws. Subordination is unknown, and great military force can alone effect, what an inoffensive symbol of office in the hand of an old woman, would and does execute in every civilized country upon the face of the globe.

Happy is it for the rest of the earth, that this nation of monsters, like tigers or lions, cannot act in droves

Unparalleled violence! disgraceful to civilization. The rents of small farms in this country are collected with more violence, arms and bloodshed, than imperial tributes are in the savage states of Asia. The courageous great, urged by extravagance and lux. ury, dare withhold indulgence from the ferocious and oppressed

tenant.

or unity. That very ignorance which makes them indifferent to danger or their own preservation, would enable them to violate and subdue the rights and liberties of all mankind, but religion has destroyed that union, and as if to expiate the misery it has caused for many ages past, here operates a powerful good, destroying by bigotry all union, and forces them to turn their sanguinary talons upon themselves, which diverts and disables them from oppressing and enslaving the rest of mankind.

The character of the Irish nation is a moral phænomenon, which proves above all other evidence, that mankind has its species as well as the brute kind. It may be evinced from observation, that in proportion as the powers of animation convey energy to the passions, it gives it to the mental faculties. We must here take notice, that it is sensibility I speak of, and not any particular passion. In the course of my observation, I have always found good sense associated therewith; but in the moral constitution of the Irish nation I find this quality all on the side of passion, and the mind that sees with wonderful perspicuity on one side of the object under contemplation, is absolutely incapable to take a simultaneous view of all its parts, and possesses neither extension nor profundity.

The cause of this lays beyond the power of discovery;; the cure, however, does not; for we see, in those persons who have long associated with the English nation, more capacity to think, than in others who have not had that advantage, and their natural ferocity of temper wears off in proportion as that faculty augments.

The means of bringing this nation to make any progress in the attainment of wisdom and happiness, will be to select virtuous characters from their own sister kingdom, to place them in the offices of civil and political administration, choose them for ministers of religion, and masters of education. Let a more intimate intercourse of marriage and residence with England be established as a system; and it is only by such universal communication and influence. that the present animal

existence of an Irishman can be brought into intellectual existence; and when they enter into that happy orbit, let them learn from the dreadful example of misery and decline, which policy and luxury must in a short period bring upon their sister kingdom, that intellectual power is to be employed in studying man, to discover the state of well-being in conformity to his nature; and that wisdow and virtue are the means to procure it, as wealth and grandeur are to destroy it socially and individually.

Pardon me, virtuous characters of Ireland, if the enthusiasm with which I embrace the cause of suffering humanity, should force me to a severity of censure, which may wound the feelings of patriotism.* I lament that prejudice has such an influence over the pride of virtue and honor, that it sympathizes in the groans of its tortured enemies-vice and ignorance.

Ani

I mean to inflame your resentment-I mean to animate you. Satire should touch the quick of man, selflove. This urges him to action, and is unlike the sophistry of measured rhetorical periods, which serve but to burthen his memory and confound his reason. mated language, like electrical fire, strikes all minds with the same force, in the same moment. It is the energy of simple words that creates thought-thought, action— and action by the combination of numbers, produces irresistible force and efficacy to whatever it may be applied.

•Like a skilful and unpitying surgeon, I must cut into the gangrene, though the sound flesh must suffer in the operation.

FRANCE.

How important is the situation of this numerous and powerful nation, having torn from the hands of the monster, tyranny, the iron sceptre that oppressed it with fear and terror, and laboring under the rage of enthusiasm, to put the silken fetters of law and order upon the convulsed and active arm of struggling Liberty! The contemplative regard of the whole world, anxious for the fate of humanity, attends upon this political phe nomenon-this wonderful event, that eclipses in impor tance and novelty the whole records of universal history, I will not attempt to augur success or failure; but while I congratulate them upon their glorious triumph over tyranny, I will proceed to examine the source of all good and evil, the hearts and minds of the individuals of whom this nation is formed, and by exposing the de fects, propose such means of improvement, as may for. ward the end of all association-human happiness,

This land is most partially and eminently blessed by Nature in all its physical relations; the climate is healthy and the soil productive. Man, here possesses an instinct, [LovE,] which has given him an animal happiness superior to all other people, enabling him to fill up the moment with pleasure, inducing him to adopt it as a system and to study it as a science; while a neighbor ing nation acquires it by stealth or accident, regarding it as as an enemy to public and individual prosperity.

This nation, even while it was convulsed in political apathy and slavery, enjoyed the most perfect moral liberty; and he who was so fortunate as to escape the regards of political tyranny, was the freest man upon the globe. Nature has blessed the mind with such instinctive toleration, that foibles are reciprocally pardoned. Here the fiend jealousy that cursed enemy to human happiness, holds not in a state of torture and subjection,

love, the first and freest affection of the human heart. Instinct, unerring, shows the chains of love to be formed by the imponderous links of attraction, and where their influence is not felt, to bind it with the iron chains of violence and force, is regarded as equally foolish and atrocious. Jealousy, in a liberal mind, operates only in regret, and struggles to regain a lost, beloved object, by redoubling its effort to please, and when this does not succeed, and hope is swallowed up by despair, the rejected lover leaves the pursuit, and forgets the disappointment in the affection of some more congenial object. This country from its state of moral liberty, has been the asylum to persecuted Nature: here Southern nations, of amorous weakness and tenderness, withdrew from their detested regions, bedewed with the blood of love's victims, sacrificed on the altar of vindictive jealousy : here those of the West withdrew from the morose, illnatured censure of innumerable laws of social decorum, and found a congenial spirit of liberality, that gave respiration to the suffocation of endless oppressive formalities: here the nations of the North exchanged the heavy moral and physical atmosphere, for one more light and gay; and the mind, contracted by rigid rules and customs, expanded in the mild region of genius and pleasure.

If this great blessing of moral liberty be secured under the benign and auspicious influence of a free constitution; and if to the animal enjoyments of pleasure could be added, by the force of wisdom, intellectual happiness, a native of this country would be chosen as an example to the world, of a man existing in a state of enlightened Nature.

O Frenchmen! how glorious is the attempt of your present revolution; the hearts and happiness of all man kind are interested. Permit me, with the zeal of a child of Nature, sympathizing with all sensitive matter, to expose to you the conceptions of an unprejudiced ingenuous mind, which, though they may not have the consistency or perfectability of system, may be as scatter.

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