Declaration of the Catholic Society of Dublin (Dublin: Printed by Peter Hoey,1 [1791])

IN the present enlightened and improving period of Society, it is not for the Irish Roman Catholics alone to continue silent. – Not accused of any crime; not conscious of any delinquency, they suffer a privation of rights and conveniencies, the penalty reserved, in wise states, for offences of atrocious magnitude. – It does not become them, whilst with liberality ever / to be gratefully remembered, many descriptions of their Fellow-citizens compassionate their situation, to seem indifferent to the desirable, and, they hope, not distant event of their emancipation. – They wish to ascertain upon what terms they may venture to settle in a Country, which they love with the rational preference of Men, not the simplicity of puerile acquiescence. – It is not for the Irish Catholics, armed as their cause is with reason and justice, like public foes to seek advantage from public calamity. – They ought to advance their claim at a time most favourable to discussion, when the condition of the Empire is flourishing and tranquil. – They might seem culpable to their Country, if, affecting to dissemble what it were unmanly not to feel, they reserved their pretensions in ambuscade to augment the perplexities of some critical emergency. – They should be culpable to posterity, if they omitted to profit of the general inclination of public sentiment. – They should be culpable to themselves, if they suffered an imputation to subsist, that in the extent of the British territory they alone submit, without repining, to a mortifying and oppressive bondage, degrading to themselves, and pernicious to their Country. – They conceive that in the present state of things, their silence might be received as evidence of such dispositions.