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The speeches of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran
The speeches of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran Author:John Philpot Curran Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: lawyer named Babbler. I do not recollect that there were sponsors at the baptismal font; nor was there any occasion, as the infant had promised and vowed so many... more » things in his own name. Indeed I find it difficult to reply, for I am not accustomed to pronounce panegyrics on myself; I do not know well how to do it; but since I cannot tell you what I am, I shall tell you what I am not:—I am not a man whose respect in person and character depends upon the importance of his office; I am not a young man who thrusts himself into the foreground of a picture, which ought to be occupied by a better figure ; I am not a man who replies with invective, when sinking under the weight of argument; I am not a man who denied the necessity of a parliamentary reform, at the time he proved the expediency of it, by reviling his own constituents, the parish clerk, the sexton, and the grave-digger; and if there be any man who can apply what I am not to himself, I leave him to think of it in the committee, and to contemplate it when he goes home.—Debates, vol. iv., pp. 402—10. The resolution was negatived by 143 to 71. ORDE'S COMMERCIAL PROPOSITIONS. June 30th, 1785. the interest of Ireland to be subordinate to England, when her parliament had ceased to be so? This Mr. Pitt tried to adjudicate against, by deceit, in 1785, and failing, he resolved to reach the same end by abolishing our parliament, and this he unhappily accomplished in 1800. There is no political event from 1782 to the Union of greater importance than the discussion of Orde's Propositions. In Grattan's Memoirs, vol. iii., and in Se- ward's Collectanea Politico, valuable elements of a judgment on this matter will be found. I tried to sum up the history of the transaction in the Citizen Magazine for September, 1841, in reviewi...« less