of Physicians in Dublin in 1790 but due, he believed, to his "dabbling in politics", he was never admitted to the Fellowship. Yet undaunted, in January 1795 he addressed to the newly arrived Lord Lieutenant, William Fitzwilliam, at Dublin Castle, a fifty-six-page "letter". More copies were to sell in Belfast and the North (for which, Drennan confessed, the letter was "chiefly designed") than any pamphlet of the period save Paine's Rights of Man. The letter insists that the only plot afoot in Ireland is "the plot of Protestant Ascendancy" to represent Presbyterians as Jacobins engaged in "a reformer, republican and regicide plot", and to "stitch together" the "Catholic Committee, Defenders, United Irishmen,... French emissaries and a monstrous tail of et ceteras" as a "scarecrow". Conscious as he was that opinion among the United Irish and Defenders was running in the direction of a French-assisted insurrection, Drennan nonetheless tasks the Lord Lieutenant with averting a "rude and revolutionary collision". He directs Fitzwilliam's immediate attention to reform: "full and final" Catholic Emancipation, the promotion of manufactures to provide employment for the landless, and a system of "universal education" that can "assimilate all religions". But this, he concedes, was but a "bill for partial reform". In Ireland, he noted, the aristocracy had "seconded" the "revolution of '82". But directly represented in one house of parliament, the Lords, they continue to control the other. Two-thirds of the Irish Commons are returned "by less than one hundred persons" [in the case of Belfast and its two MP's by the Marquess of Donegall] Having "the whole return of members to serve in parliament", men of "rank, fortune and connection" in the kingdom are formed into "a political party" in "league... against the population of the country". In calling for "equality of suffrage" and "constitutional democracy", "the people in the North of Ireland" are not, as the Lord Lieutenant may have been given to suppose, "infected by what are called French principles". Rather they are "obstinately attached to the principles of Locke as put into practice at the revolution [The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England]... and illustrated in the plains of America". Consistent with "the fundamental article of the British Constitution that holds taxation to be "inseparable" from representation", where people are denied legislative power they have "the same reason to complain as the Americans had lately, on the other side of the Atlantic, or as