ISAAC BUTT
in the City of Dublin. Not the right of a single freeman to vote for municipal offices is retained. No privilege is spared—no franchise respected. However your lordships may decide as to the admission to new rights and new franchises, we fearlessly assert that no reason has yet been supplied which can justify you as the highest court of judicature in the land in forfeiting the existing right of freemen. Thus, my lords, our first ground of protesting against this Bill is that of individual injustice. You punish a number of individuals who have been advanced under the existing order of things to the highest offices in the magistracy of the city; I say you punish, because to degrade is to punish. You degrade, in the evening of their days, the aldermen—men who have borne an unblemished character, who, as magistrates, have never yet been charged with partiality in the execution of their magisterial duties; you degrade the sheriff's peers, who have acquired their right by long and onerous attention to several duties; and you degrade the freemen of the City of Dublin, because you take from them their rights—rights which have hitherto been supposed to rest upon the same foundation as the privileges of your lordships' illustrious House—upon hereditary succession, the transmission from father to son, upon the charters of monarchs, and upon repeated acts of Parliament recognizing their privileges. I do again and again urge upon your lordships' justice this one broad principle of the Constitution, that by the
189
