PEOPLE! TRUST NOT YOUR BULL-DOG TO THE TORIES.
PARTS, December 10th. "This is the fountain of all those bitter waters of which, through a hundred different conduits, we have drunk until we are read) to Imrst."—BuitKE. THE reader who, immersed in those two terrible dramas, the Ameri- can and French Revolution wars, looks back a moment upon the omi- nous epochs when the swell began to be felt, but the storm had not yet burst out in its fury, cannot forbear exclaiming passionately—Oh ! that the veil which bid the days to come, could but for an instant have been removed from the eyes of our countrymen! But God has given unto his creatures only one means of looking into futurity; he has endowed them with memory to recollect the past, and with reason to deduce from it time probable future. The past, the horrid past, is spread cut before our eyes,—a sanguinary roll, written inside and outside with dis- tress of nations, with mourning and wo,—a volume dark and dismal, that should be ever before the eyes of the citizen, like the ghastly memento marl that grins on the table of the penitent, and transports his thoughts from the present to that which has been, and to that which is to be. It is at this moment that men should pore with most anxiety on the contents of this book, to catch therein a sons Virailiana—obviotis in every page—which may reveal a glimpse of what is bidden from their view : it is at this crisis, while the scales are hung out, and two con- flicting interests weighed in the balance, that they should use the expe- rience for which they have paid thirty years of slaughter, and fastened on peens. Ives Ned • their posterity an everlasting tribute of labour. Note r. the aapniuted day, now k the hour of salvation : the Faction, that for half a I% II! toy and upwards has domineered in this land, and wrought tea ter it the destiny which our fathers saw and felt—which we have reel in part too, end yet feel, whielt our children, even to the latest Frnecntiee, shall never (tease to feel—in an aggravation of the original cake that deueunced " By the sweat of his brow shall men eat • bread,"
fart ion, temporarily dismounted, has once again obtruded itself into the seat of power. If then what is passing under your own eyes, in \ern- (evil time and in your own land.—if luxury set off by starvation, and p".1111 newking at distresia—if the comfortable sinecurist, the worthless )ensioner, the dignified do-nothing, pampered on three lir- hies, end pieterly eating the substance of forty familiefe—if in your own
NINE ANNUAL MILLIONS, whose principal was by your forefathers ret apart fur religion, for charity, for instruction, divided, like so much lhatoug seven thousand individuals, useless to the State and often werthlese,—it in your sister island, more than one twentieth of a soil
has to maintain eight millions, appropriated by twenty.two
vdl-railed Biskops, and an income of more than a million, levied en the Made population to feed eight 1 dred ecclesiastics of a church that vomits arnong its followers but a fifteenth of that population,—if veer own unconquerable energies, cramped by laws that abridge the staff et in..: to your labourers, and blunted by exactions that eat into the core of indiatey.—if the sanctuary of justice—the resource of the wronged —the cuff mid object of civil institutions, inaccerssible to all who have yet .vherewithal to fee largely the privileged door.keepers,—if wealth areumidated in noble hands by favour of your unequalled enterprise, skill, aii4pere.verance, overflowing into your electoral towns, debauching your countrymen on whose votes repose your destinies, swamping the Ivry fierialations of your liberty and the source of the reforms you cull for.—if the blood of Englishmen, shed, not in battle, where it was never spared. but at home, in the heart of your crowded cities, in universal peace. under the lashof the Tory scourge,—if an hereditary Oligarchy, ignoreet. haughty, and seltish, cud a legislatorial priesthood that should I,, eontent to discharge its proper duties, creating laws to regulate in- terests they do not understand, and interfere with you, who need no- thing but the privilege of exerting the faculties wherewith God has en- &Wed you, and eating with gratitude to Him what your own labour has varned,—if these and a hundred more abuses, engendered by time, hy negligence, by ignorance and human cupidity, cannot rouse that voice of thmeler, before which the criminals of the Commonwealth flit away like fowl before the tempest ; turn your eyes, I pray ye, a little from the present, and fix them on the origin of two wars, which have cost ocettes of blood, millions of treasures, an everlasting tax on labour, and an indelible blot on your history. Ask yourselves simply for what this WM was shed, these millions spent, this tax imposed, this stain con- tracted ; and see whether the answer be not—to fasten upon you the domination you have lately striven so hard to shake off, and which it is even now sought to refit to your necks—to plant in your sides the spur which, after an interval of ,repose, is beginning again to gall yew- flank. Your fathers had begun to breathe from a general war, wherein they had reaped, along with some glory, the satisfaction of voiding the last of the bile engendered in them by the attempts of a Bourbon King to compel Great Britain to a second Restoration. They were the world's Lilwrals then ; they were the forlorn hope of Revolution ; their standard was the tricolour of freedom ; they had borne it bravely by land and by sea ; its enemies and their enemies were humbled in the dust. The Bluish people beyond the Atlantic had amply done their part; they had stood ferward with hand and heart and purse; they had showed an eourey and discovered resources beyond expectation ; and had in- vehad themselves deeply in debt in a cause which they made their own. ! said the Tory Administration of the Tory King, it is so !—you thall !,e taxed then ; and what your patriotism has voluntarilyaccorded, our authority shall in future exact. With the childish impatience that ripped open the golden goose, they conceived that to obtain a revenue, they had only to lay on taxes ; and in that forgetfulness, so natural to Tories, of the fundamental principle of a free constitution, self, taxation, they maintained that they were entitled to tax by authority. It is im- yiesi Ile but that some plaice, of folly, of bigotry, of ignorance, of sinister interest, should be wrought up with the very best and freest govern- ment you van constitute ; but it depends on you, the People, what shall be the extent and the duration of the mischief. It is a grand lesson to consider the mateeuvres of the Feeder) and the fluctuations of public opinien, before the People and even the Parliament were wound up to the pitch required for giving scope and room enough to the wickedness of lorvism. The fatal act by which it was proposed to hind America and brand a free people with the character of slaves—a bond of green air hes which the Transatlantic Sampson 1 first the instant he was roused —wds passed, repealed with universal applause, passed again, and again shrerst tutally tepealed : so long did patriotism tied Toryism hang in tiltet.nately preponderating scales. With every new swell of national pod sense and liberality, the scale of right predominated ; and at one moment, it so far overcame the antagonist force, that the Court itself was stormed. goeernment wrested from the Tory clique, and compul- sory admi-sions yielded to a conciliating Whig Ministry. But the lucid :nterval was short ; the Tory King and Faction, alter every pos- Mille hack-stairs effort to neutralize the unwelcome influence of national interests o bile in power, at length put their shoulders to the obstarle, Sit! shoved it fairly out of doors. Elie temper of the Nation was still unripe for explosion—the fluctuations of opinion were many; at length, Britain's evil genius prevailed, and the People went toad with Toryism. Every venal scribe, every lackey pen, every bellwether of the Faction— Piet, &a:11111rd, Times, and all—were let loose upon your devoted fathers ; mail their fellow-citizens of America, standing up in defence of their just rights, and asserting only what Englishmen gloried in hav- ing vomptered, became as convicted criminals in their eyes. Onr Celo- Ines ref use us a reveture—orer children rebel against the Mother Me- 11'1'1)(41S-0 Ur subjects diepute the omnipotence of Parliament—we by ?ars, and they wont; each was the lie that made the refrain of Tory- "an. u LIE—for the Ausericaus (cf whose trade Great Britain had, by the Art of Navigation, accured to herself a monopoly) were assertiug only their right to tax themselves, by the medium of their own Assem- blies, and lied done this *V freely in the last war as to have involved themselves deeply in debt. Thus the English People—the besotted but most unhappy People—went to an exterminating war with their brethren in America, for following their own example and acting up to the spirit of' their own constitution. The Toth s hall the supreme satisfaction of leading on the poor deluded creatures into a war with America, seconded by France, in defence of a prerogative whose crea- tion had cost one British Sovereign his crown and another his life. The exiled and the beheaded STUART—the Tory martyrs—were amply revenged on the adversary by hint who.-n the adversary had himself called over to fill their vacant seat. Great Britain, at war by sea rind by land, in the East and the West, in the Old World and the New, against the very principle of her own constitution, and in support of pre- tensions %Lich she had withstood by a four years' intestine war, and crushed along with the King, Lords, and Commons, in one common ruin—such was the spectacle your fathers exhibited to the eyes of a wondering world in the third reign of your Revolutionary dynasty ! Strange phenomenon, but too easily explained. There is in every free people a pride of heart, a high stomach, a proneness to aggression, a cont. &dimness, which a trifle will rouse, and which roused it is impossible for reason to lay. Your fathers have been known in all time, all the world over, for this perilous propensity. They showed it sometimes in wild outbreaks into foreign lands ; sometimes in tearing the bowels of their mother soil ; often on the wide ocean, whose heaving was not more in- cessant than the war of Englishmen on its surface; and at last honour- ably and triumphantly in a grand struggle for the liberty of sityieg what they thought, paying what they pleased, and defying the Devil after their own fashion. The &rumen found it to their cost, and the GUELPHS IVOUld have found it too, had the Tories ventured to practise on the People at home a tithe of the oppression they meditated against the People abroad. This pugnacious turn, this bull-dog quality—the foundation.of much of your glory as a people, and the source of your greatest terrors—has been the instrm»cht by which the Tories have contrived to make you the workers of your own damage and the authors of their vengeance. They hated the prin-• ciple to which they were forced to submit at home; and, with the naalig- mint satisfaction of a damton, they chuckled to see you wading through blood and crime and devastation to exterminate it abroad. The pelican is the type of Wisdom's self; compared to the British People ; for they have torn their own breast to feed their worst enemies. Ever since the hateful period of the American War, the Tories have, with rare inter- vals on your part of better feeling and juster sentiment, had the bull- dog in their keeping; and they have unchained him against whatever in the whole world was anywhere to be found of liberal, generous, and patriotic. They who, in passive obedience, had, spaniel-like, fawned on the Srruwars—who had welcomed the Pretender into the heart of Eng- land with their cups, but kept their sword in the sheath—who, like dogs beaten with a cudgel from the carrion, had for two reigns bayed at a -distance from power, which the Whigs of those (lays held with a stronger hand than their feeble successors—the Tories—had at last their revenge. They put their bit into the People's mouth ; they plunged the spur into its flank, and goaded it MI to battle against its own cause and its own interests. They sat at the helm of power, and wielded the thunder of the State to blast therewith the principles whose vindication had made the name of an Englishman as respectable in Europe as ever had been that of a Roman.
The reader, who is conscious how low the predominance of Toryism. has brought the national character, feels its degradation the more poig.. nantly, when he finds how highly it had been appreciated by the great Continental writers of the eighteenth century—" 0 fall, from what high state of bliss into what wo !" Up to the accession of GEORGE the Third, the career of the British People, often strange and wild, had been marked by much grandeur, and no national degradation. The wars in France were at least illustrated by victory; and those of con- flicting dynasties at home were incident to a state of feudal darkness and martial spirit. The triumph over Spain and the protection of Holland had reflected glory on the country before the dawn of her free- dom; and the triumph of freedom, though sullied by excesses and dis- figured by fanaticism, was a grand sem in the history of the Modern World. The reigns of the Restoration, though full of ignominy, were more disgraceful to the dynasty than to the nation, and what the latter had contracted of dishonour was wiped away at the Revolution. The wars which ensued were signalized by victory and recommended by the justice of the cause : the standard of MARLBOROUGH floating within the French frontier was a national reply to the insolence of the Grand Mo. narque, who had presumed to dictate a king to Great Britain, and who was rescued from the sight of them floating over St. Denis only by a Court intrigue, a quarrel of women, and a Tory peace. The first, and, with one exception, the last peace the Tories ever voluntinily made for their country, stopped her in the career of her greatest glory and ill the most righteous of her wars. Great Britain was involved in Continental wars in after reigns for interests purely German ; it was the tax she paid to the House of Hanover for the trouble of wearing the British crown : but bier arms were still victorious by land and sea ; she was still following up the resentment flowing from hostility to a foreign despotism that had espoused the Cause of the despotism she had banished ; and she was again arrested, in full career, by a Court and Tory peace. During this, the glorious period of British annals, the Tories—except when they stele a moment into power, through a weak woman's favour, and patched up the miser- able peace of Utrecht—made no other appearaace than that of malecon- tente, of Jacobites, of Carlists. They turned their eyes with loathing from the bright day, for its beams were hateful to them, as being those of liberty and revolution. But their time was to come : a King arose who knew not Joseph ; and the popularity of a youthful monarch, the intitterce of a court, u septeenial Unreformed Parliament, and the in- toxication of a loug career of victory, combined to put the British bull- dog into the hands of the Tories ; whose first act—to revenge them- selves on the past—was to let him loose upon the free citizens of A inetiea. That it waS. their despotical temper and hatred of rewrite. tion pi inriples that urged them to this, is clear; inasmuch as the ground of revenue was a notorious pretext, the taxes that constituted it having been almost totally repealed, and nothing remained to go to war for but the preamble of the act, which asserted the pretensions to arbitrary taxation. In this cause, the sons and grandsons of the Revolution soldiers
went to war and fared even as they deserved. The issue was as di-grace- ful as the principle was atrocious ; your honoured tricolour, triumphant on a hundred battle-fields, was rent in tatters and dragged in the mire. To be defeated, doe' not of itself imply disgrace : the soldiers of NAPOLEON, falling for France at Waterloo, were not dishonoured ; the Poles have been vanquished with glory ; the victory of their oppressors has covered the latter with ignominy. But to the shame of a total defeat, your fathers added that of an infamous cause. The first grand achievement of the Tory reign was the acquisition of infamy doubled into infamy. Meanwhile the Tory King enjoyed his Civil List ; and the Parliament paid his debts, when that enormous allowance was found inadequate to maintain the " just splendour of the crown." Meanwhile the Tories held their places, and their creatures kept whatever portion—no small one—of the millions spent in the war, that stuck to their fingers as they passed through their hands. Meanwhile the Tory Commons and the 'Tory Lords had their sinecures, their pensions, their posts, their dignities, their governments abroad and at Lome, their fat livings and episcopal sees, their thousand places that" provided great rewards for no services." Unhappy people ! your share was a hundred millions of debt; the hostility of your brethren ; the derision of Europe ; the con-
sciousness of defeat in a bad cause ; and a blot, never to be wiped out, in your history. Your good name has never recovered the blemish it then contracted ; your post in the vanguard of European freedom has been lost ; the nations look no more to you as the patriot's Polar star, the everlasting beacon of enslaved and benighted nations.
It was in the nature of things that you should separate from your Colonies : a vast people beyond the Atlantic could not for ever remain united in the bonds of filial allegiance : but it was in the power of your fathers to have relaxed them gradually, and to the relationship of colony and metropolis to have substituted the friendliness of kindred nations, united by community of language, of interest, of naturally glorious and endearing recollections. This was the euthanasia of your union—this was reasonable—this was patriotic—this was accordant with your interests and their interests—this was consistent with just principles and free government —this was peace and good-will : but this was not Toryism. These Court fanatics judged it right and proper and politic to tighten the reins, to stretch authority, to violate principles, to abuse power, to enforce, to punish, to proclaim martial law, to add arbitrary taxation to a commercial monopoly; and your fathers lent them the bull-dog ! The King was resolved to be king—" it was the way at Zell ; " why should it not be so also in Great Britain ? and America was a good field for a preparatory experiment. SOGEORGE was every inch a king ; and, king-like, he warred, till the people of Yorkshire, sending up a petition to Parliament as long as the high- road between London and York, put an end to his campaigning. The great Tory Monarch then assured the American Ambassador, that as he had been the last man in his kingdom to consent to American in- dependence, so he would be the last to violate it. And the courtiers to applaud, and the Tory press to cry, What magnanimity ! and the poor people to believe they bad got payment in full for debt, defeat, disgrace,
and disaster ! It is a pity, but it is true, that if a man in that station were but to say—" Give me some drink," there would not be wanting
in this free land of Britain a lackey newspaper to exclaim—how " dig- nified ! " " what temper, grace, and calmness !" and all, who saw no- thing in it but an intimation of thirstiness, would be "animals that could not understand it."
But, to conclude with your fathers and their bull-dog, to console them for what little vexation and concern this gracious speech had left In their bosoms, they had the satisfaction of reaecting that a wise Pro- vidence bad ordered every thing for their good, and plunged them in disaster and defeat to work out their own salvation. For, suppose that Toryism had triumphed in America, and the people had been reduced to pay whatever taxes authority was pleased to impose, yet slaves re- quire to be guarded ; a vast nation of reluctant vassals could have been controlled only by a vast army ; and if Ireland takes forty thou- sand men, calculate how many America would have demanded. This army you would have paid ; and, worse than paying, an army—though of Englishmen, long habituated to ride d6wn resistance to arbitrary power abroad—would have been an apt instrument to do the Tories the same good turn at home. 0 fools ! fools ! we have been disgraced, baffled, sunk in debt and dirt, and thanked the stars that Heaven had wisely ordered it for our good. Countrymen, you see what it is to consign your bull-dog into Tory hands. Be advised ! There is indeed no vast empire beyond the Atlantic for Toryism to expatiate in and play the tyrant ; but its spirit is un- changed and unchangeable ; give it but head, and as it disgraced you and Jost you America in the eighteenth, so it will disgrace and lose you Ireland in the nineteenth century. Oh look to your bull-dog as you love Reform—as you honour your country—as you would preserve the Union of your Three Nations—as you would have justice without beg- gary, religion without tithes, elections without bribery, and industry without restriction. Trust but your bull-dog one half year to the Tories, and they will make him fly at the throats of your Irish brethren, in a war for pluralities, tithes, absenteeism, and every Tory abomina- tion. Remember the cause of Ireland is your own cause ; her wrongs, your wrongs ; her grievances, your grievances. Were there degrees of justice, her cause is even more righteous than yours ; her churchmen are more exorbitant ; her impositions more burdensome ; her poverty more shocking ; her abuses more audacious, naked, and unblushing. Lend your bull-dog to these men, who have got iifto power by the road by which they reached it previous to the American War, and as they then repealed the Stamp Act Repeal Bill, passed a fresh act of tax- ation, went to war for it, and lost you an empire, so will they lead you into a war with your sister isle, lose you Ireland, or hold it by the sword ; and, when your passions are in a blaze and the bull-dog is.ra - venous, they will strike the blow and repeal your Reform Bill.
A people that cannot see beyond its nose, and will not take warning from the past, is a people to be fleeced, cudgelled, and rough-ridden by Tories.
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