best suit the further views of this Machiavelian policy-This was the great and broad foundation of the Union."

What measure too desperate, or too base, which cannot be carried when a people are divided? Yet it is painful to see with what foolish triumph some Irishmen hail their own insignificance; how thoughtlessly they endeavour to calumniate the names and the motives of those distinguished individuals, who, at the period of which we are speaking, held out to their country, tossed about on a troubled sea, the steady lights of their firm and cultivated understandings. "Too long (said those estimable men whom inferior minds would wish to reduce in the estimation of their country) have the Irish People been set in array of battle against each other-too long have the rancour and revenge of our ancestors been left as a legacy of blood to their posterity-too long has one limb of the social body been tied down, until it had nearly lost all feeling, life and energy. It is our wish, it is our hope, to give IreLand the full and free possession of both her arms, her Catho lic arm as well as her Protestant arm, that she may the better embrace her friends, or grapple with her foes." Yet there are political writers, who deplore the hour which would witness the union of religions in Ireland; who would set sect against sect, with all the fury and bitterness of fanaticism; who would insist upon the impossibility of either Catholics or Protestants, or Presbyterians, ever acting in the spirit of Christianity, animated by its benevolent precepts, its charity, or its mercy.

We lament the necessity of being obliged to call public attention to the following passage, which we read in the preface to a work lately published in Belfast, by Mr. Berwick, called, a History of Belfast. Why thus endeavour to divide those denominations of Christianity, which, whatever their speculative differences may be, are fighting a common cause against the common enemies of both-the Atheist and the Deist ? Why inculcate opinions which go to establish the eternal slavery of men, because they differ from each other upon abstract points of theology? It is productions like those we now allude to, which makes Ireland so o

To those who only apply to the records of history to glean the filth and corruption of its pages; who make that filth and that corruption their daily sustenance; who, like their predecessors in the work of national division, vainly struggle to keep alive the embers of religious and political bigotry-to such men I say, the volume I now give to the public can not be a source of pleasure or instruction. They have taken their line; and that line they think leads on to public notice and to fortune. They recommend a renewal of religious war +a revival of ancient antipathies-a return of ancient discord. They imagine that this course leads directly to personal consequence. They see distinctly that their country has fallen, and that those, and those alone who would dance upon its tomb

dious to its inhabitants, and which compels those who can accomplish it, to abandon a country, where conscience is eternally persecuted. We would recommend Mr. Berwick to omit the entire of his Preface in the next edition of a Work which is in many respects very valuable to the reader. In this Preface we read the following

"When we reflect on the inveterate hostility which has subsisted among Protestants and Roman Catholics ever since the reformation, and on the sense which the former has invariably entertained of the inevita ble tendency of the principles of the latter to promote arbitrary power in the state, and intolerance and persecution in the church, it must surely excite surprize, that a coalition should ever have been formed between such conflicting parties, for the purpose of extending the bounds of civil and religious liberty."

And again" That the Irish Romanists participated with their orthodox brethren abroad, in a detestation of French principles, it is impossi ble to deny. However, to the utter amazement of all, they entered warmly (in 1792) into the views of the United Irishmen, and stepped forward as ardent and disinterested champions of civil and religious liberty! Such a monstrous coalition struck all reflecting men with astonishment, and the long established maxim of popery immediately occurred to their thoughts, that no methods, whether of deceit or violence, are to be left unattempted for the service of their church, which, in all their lowest fortunes, they never suffer to be removed out of sight-that all forms of complaisance and dissimulation, of civility and good-humor, even to beretics themselves, are to be put on, to inveigle them to their own ruin' (Hoadley's Sermons, XI. p. 220.) and they must have recollected that Queen Mary, before she commenced the work of blood, commanded all her loving subjects to live together in quiet sort, leaving aside those new found devilish terms of Papist and Heretic,' and that the plea of liberty of conscience and universal toleration was the ladder by which James II. endeavoured to mount to the summit of his ambition, and overthrow the constitution which he had sworn to support."

stone may flatter themselves with the hope of political conse» ■ quence. When such men appear, it is full time to set afloat the antidote to the poison; it is time to take down those pages from the shelves on which they have so long, and so inglori ously slumbered, and which contained those sacred principles > and universal sentiments that breathe in every line, and which may yet contribute to regenerate a people, who have been the victims of public treason.

When I first determined on the present work, I did conceive, that the learned Editors of the Belfast Politics, Messrs. Joy and BRUCE, had labored to withdraw from circulation whatever remained of that very excellent publication. Since, however, I announced my intention, a few numbers: of this popular work have re-appeared, and are now selling by my much respected fellow-citizen, Mr. S. Archer. I wish every success to the sale of that work, and thank Messrs. Joy and Bruce for the sudden and unexpected change of their sentiments on the prudence and propriety of its circulation. I am very certain that those gentlemen, in the utmost strainings of their benevolence, or the warmest aspirations of their patriotism, cannot confer a greater benefit on the community, than by the cheap and rapid dissemination of the doctrines contained in the pages of the Belfast Politics. I shall preserve those pages, and re-publish them in a cheap and convenient form for our countrymen; but I shall do much more; I shall add those political documents which Messrs. Bruce and Joy did not publish, and which are perhaps the most valued, and most valuable portion of the politics of Belfast. Indeed, when we speak of Belfast Politics, we comprehend almost every political document in Ireland, which had deserved celebrity, from 1769 to 1796.

Ireland took her tone from Belfast, and perhaps will continue to imitate her example. Messrs. Bruce and Joy must be aware, that it is an idle effort, to attempt the suppression of

C

a work in a town like Belfast, which never could be charged with literary monopoly; whose citizens are not to be influenced by names, but principles; who are not to be convinced by the swagger of dogmatism, but the cool and dispassionate exercise of reason and common sense.

Before I proceed to give to my readers those celebrated po¬ litical productions which so powerfully directed the mind of our country from 1769 to 1796, I have considered that it would not be a bad mode of estimating the labors of modern patriots, to take a retrospective view of the state of that country, whose liberties they had asserted, and whose feelings they had defended. I therefore have endeavoured to give a rapid but comprehensive history of my country from that æra, from which British freedom has so often been dated, and have brought it down to that year, when the labors of our Irish Patriots commence their great and benevolent work. Thus will I present to my readers a volume every way worthy of their protection; and thus will I be the instrument of recalling to the memory of Ireland those memorials of their genius, their learning and their patriotism, which should never be forgotten.

JOHN LAWLESS.

Belfast, 9, King-street.

June 30, 1817.

A

COMPENDIUM OF IRISH HISTORY;

FROM THE REVOLUTION OF 1688 To 1779.

FROM

ROM the period of the English establishment, first ef fected, afterwards established, and finally secured by domestic treachery and division, there appears to have been no intention, on the part of the invaders, to give the people the benefit of free and wholesome laws; and so far from wishing to coalesce and unite with the native inhabitants, the ill-fated policy of the invaders appears to have been to foment and perpetuate dissention, animosity, and hatred between the two nations; and it would appear, as Sir John Davis testifies, "that such as had the government of Ireland, under the Crown of England, did intend to make a perpetual separation and enmity between the English and Irish."

Long did this ill-fated country groan under oppression and injustice-her rights trampled upon and disregarded-her complaints unattended to-and her sufferings unredressed; laboring under every corruption in her domestic government, deprived of all internal police, plundered by rapacious foreigners, and abandoned in despair by her children.