Excerpt from An Inquiry Into the Ancient Corporate System of Ireland A cross and intimate acquaintance with some of the corporate towns of Ireland, with their social condition, political feelings, and local grievances, first led to those inquiries which have terminated in the present publication. It was during my intercourse with those towns and their intelligent inhabitants, that I became conversant with the many, the complicated, and long-nurtured evils of the present corporate system in Ireland. There I beheld that ghastly phantom of modem law a corporation of the nineteenth century without numbers, without wealth, without respectability, and, in short, with out any one quality which could invite obedience or secure respect, sitting like an incubus on the trade and prosperity of the towns, and, demon like, engendering and perpetuating public discord. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.