AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND
tives, hangmen, and officers of State; whose business is in their several departments to uphold the entire Government system, and make believe that it is a "glorious constitution" and so it has come to pass that many are deceived into supposing Parliament crimes to be real crimes—the "Government" to be an institution for securing life and property, and administering justice between man and man,—"Acts of Parliament" to be real Laws,—the preaching stipendiaries to be, in some sort, ministers of religion,—and resistance, or "sedition" against any part of the horrid machinery, to be nothing less than a sin.
A very sad state of society, indeed. And we—that is, you and other farmers, labourers, and industrious persons, who earn a livelihood, and do not live upon other people's earnings are much to blame for having suffered it so long. But, leaving for the present this part of the subject, I desire to make you think very steadfastly for a minute on one fact: the people called "Government," by help of these Parliamentmen, have still the power of creating crimes, and, in the exercise of that power, they have lately created a very extraordinary "crime" indeed. They have observed that certain men in Ireland, wearied out and exasperated past endurance at the long oppression and unnatural submission and patience of this noble country, under such a system of fraud and blood, did begin at length to say to their countrymen that they should put an end to it altogether, by open and armed resistance; and to show them how similar systems of blood and fraud had been
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