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of the age as to the best mode of maintaining public faith, have citap.committed a flagrant violation of public faith and that not asingle lord should have been so honest or so factious as toprotest against an act of monstrous perfidy aggravated byhypocrisy? Or, if we could believe this, how can we believethat no voice would have been raised in any part of the worldagainst such wickedness; that the Court of Saint Germains andthe Court of Versailles would have remained profoundly silent;that no Irish exile, no English malecontent, would have uttereda murmur; that not a word of invective or sarcasm on so in-viting a subject would have been found in the w'hole compass ofthe Jacobite literature; and that it would have been reservedfor politicians of the nineteenth century to discover that a treatymade in the seventeenth century had, a few weeks after it hadbeen signed, been outrageously violated in the sight of allEurope?*

On the same day on which the Commons read for the first Debatestime the bill winch subjected Ireland to the absolute dominion East" 6of the Protestant minority, they took into consideration another Sj.matter of high importance. Throughout the country, butespecially in the capital, in the seaports and in the manu-facturing tow-ns, the minds of men were greatly excited on thesubject of the trade with the East Indies: a fierce paper war ■had during some time been raging; and several grave questions,

* The Irish Roman Catholics complained, and with but too muchreason, that, at a later period, the Treaty of Limerick was violated; butthose very complaints are admissions that the Statute 3 W. <b M. c. 2. wasnot a violation of the Treaty. Thus the author of A Light to the Blind,speaking of the first article, says: “This article, in seven years after, wasbroken by a Parliament in Ireland summoned by the Prince of Orange,wherein a law was passed for banishing the Catholic bishops, dignitaries,and regular clergy.” Surely he never would have written thus, if tirearticle really had, only two months after it was signed, been broken by theEnglish Parliament. The Abl>£ Mac Geoghegan, too, complains that theTreaty was violated some years after it was made. But he does not pretendthat it was violated by Stat. 3 W. M. c. 2.