The Irish in the English Army & Navy and the Irish Arms Bill, in five letters, to Michael Staunton, Esq.

Abstract

At a period, when the corrupt and aristocratic rulers of these islands are proving to the world by their various unconstitutional measures, that they are unwilling to rely for support on public opinion, the only legitimate basis for honest government, the reprint, in a cheap and popular form, of the following letters, may not be deemed unseasonable, especially in Ireland, as tending to show so much of the constitution of that army, with which the oligarchy would gladly crush the strictly just, legal, and peaceable demands of an oppressed people, for the restoration of their inalienable privilege of being ruled by their own laws. But, independent of such considerations, the writer of those letters, as having a character to maintain, has been compelled to republish them, in vindication of that character, from the renewed attacks upon it by the Standard. That Tory journal, with the the usual enmity of its party to those who advocate any other position for Ireland, than that of a degraded and plundered province to England, having thought fit, amongst its other abuse of the Irish people, to threaten them with the army, as a certain means of putting down the popular demand for a domestic legislature, the writer of these pages first met the threat in The Green Book, by demonstrating, from various authorities, all most carefully and minutely specified, that the number of Irish Catholics was, and had long been, so great, not only in the army, but likewise in the navy, as to make the invincibility of the Standard's supposed "British heart and British arm," rather a doubtful matter.