Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/203

ISAAC BUTT gave up our independent Parliament, that you are to disregard us? On the faith of the legislative union, my lords, we demand that our rights should be held in the same respect as those of London. In our own Parliament they were so. Once, indeed, in that Parliament, in a debate upon the privileges of the City of Dublin, it was pleaded that some similar rights of the City of London had been respected by the English legislature. Some one dared to hint that the privileges of Dublin stood on lower and less sacred grounds. Who was the man who rose with prompt indignation to resent this insult to the Constitution of Ireland?—a man, my lords, whose memory is still held in honor in our country—the illustrious Henry Grattan! He it was who, in the spirit of a true Irishman, indignantly denounced the attempt to place the privileges of Dublin below those of London. It was no part of that great man's patriotism to vilify and bring into contempt the institutions of his country.

There is, indeed, my lords, a people who look with intense anxiety to your decision on this question—the people to whom these charters were granted, the Protestant people of Ireland. They contemplate this Bill with alarm and dismay; they believe that it will place them under a tyranny intolerant and intolerable—that it will hand over their country to the control of Jacobin clubs, but Jacobinism on which will be engrafted the worst elements of national antipathy and 193