A B Ex a jenny PROTESTANT. + lege a ah 4, ™ ” = ’ Winitine teeee = — == oe A - 6 w= a ee A LETTER TO A PROTESTANT, OR THE BALANCE OF EVILS; BEING A COMPARISON OF THE PROBABLE CONSEQUENCES OF Avcubeite THE CATHOLICS OF IRELAND, WITH THOSE OF LEAVING THEM IN THEIR PRESENT CONDITION. BY STEPHEN WOULFE, ESQ. BARRISTER AT LAW. en ES a ——— Entre’ deux facens d’agir opposees voulez vous savoir celle a qui Ja pre- ference est due? Calcullez les effects en bien eten mal et decidez vous pour ce qui promet la plus grand somme de bonheur. Bentham traité de legislation. DEDICATED TO HENRY BROUGHAM, ESQ. DUBLIN : RICHARD MILLIKEN, 104, GRAFTON-STREET. 1819. = maine ‘ a A sheer De fis el pista Bie i i Ts pmraaas — TO HENRY BROUGHAM, ESQ. SIR, T beg you will consider the following sheets, which I take the liberty of dedicat- ing to you, as a small but a sincere token of the profound respect that I entertain for your public worth. I have the honor to be Your most obedient and Humble Servant, STEPHEN WOULFE. Dublin, 23d February, 1819. ees a — oe a aes 2 A LETTER TO A PROTESTANT &c. &e. ~ MY DEAR FRIEND, EN fulfilment of the promises you exacted from me when we last conversed; together, | 1. shall pro- ceed to submit to you a detailed statement. of the evils likely to result from» emaneipating and from not emancipating the Catholics. of this country. In doing so, I must necessarily repeat not a little that has been said before. This, however, I shall avoid as much as is consistent with my plan. If any expression shall escape me which you might regard as too strong, you will, [ am sure, give it the most favourable construction, and remember, that when ‘‘ we speak of our inju- ries,’’ some allowance should be made for ‘leaving our duty a little unthought of.” You are aware, that it is not pretended, that the Catholic bears any hostility to the civil part of the B a constitution——it is not pretended that he prefers a despotism to a limitted monarchy; that he 1s * hostile to a House of Lords, or that he would wish ~ to convert the House of Commons into the su- ‘preme assembly of a republic. ;—it is not pretended ‘that he likes a trial by court martial more than a trial by jury. On all these, and such like matters, he has precisely the same interest as a Protestant, and consequently he cannot be supposed to be dif- ferently affected towards them ;—it is only in the ecclesiastical department of the state that it is ima- gined that his mterests are distinct : it is respect- ing this part alone, therefore, that any danger’ or revolution can be apprehended from him. If authority were wanting for such an obvious posi- tion, I would refer to that of Mr..Peel; the evil as stated by him to be dreaded from emancipating the Catholics is, ‘* that when they: become. the preponderating body in Ireland, as in time they must, they will endeavour to strip the established ehurch of her political supremacy, and restore their own to the splendour she anciently enjoyed.” This evil consequence has been expressed by other persons, who think, like Mr. Peel, in a great diversity of ways ; but notwithstanding the multiplied shapes which it assumes, and the va- rious arguments by which the probability of its occurrence has been attempted to be proved, it is substantially as that genteleman has put it. If any other apprehensiong be entertained, it is stu- diously concealed. | | | | Q vo The nature of the apprehended evil being agreed upon, the next thing to be done is to en- quire into the probability of its: occurrence. The probability of an evil to be inflicted by a human being depends upon his power and his in- clination. As to the power of the Roman Catho- lics to strip the established church of her tempo- ralities, it has been demonstrated to be quite un- equal to that purpose ; this topic I shall touch upon very slightly ; it zs on their incknation to do | so that I shall submit to you the result of my reflections at more length. I think I cam satisfy you that such an inclination is imputed to them without sufficient reason. I think I shall be able to prove that there are no grounds for attributing tothe Roman Catholics, either at present, or in the event of emancipation, any disposition or desire to interfere with the endowments of the eslabkshed church, or to obtam any thing similar for %#&Gwn. With this view I shall enquire, First, Whether that they entertain such an incli- nation can be fairly collected from their creed, that is, from Christianity in general, or from those par- ticular doctrines by which they differ from other sects of Christians. Secondly, Whether it can be collected from what history records of the conduct of sects in in general, Be A Thirdly, Whether it can be collected from those general principles of human nature which we are supposed to arrive at by self-examination or ‘ yeflection. Fourthly, Whether it can be collected from the demeanour of the Roman Catholics. of Ire- land, and the character they have recently exhi- bited. | As to the first of these enquiries, I believe you will agree with me,‘that there is nothing in the letter’ or the spirit of the Gospel, considered by themselves, by which the desire of a political es- tablishment for our churches could be suggested or generated. hat the labourer in the ministry should be decently sustained, the sacred writings certainly enjoin; but although they impose this duty upon each person, they do not command. him to coerce others to perform it. If it be said, that every believer in Christianity must be desirous of ensuring the administration of it rites, my answer is, that it does not appear, either from holy writ or from experiment, that this object can be best attained by giving the priesthood.a political esta- blishment. The Catholics of Ireland have rea- son to know, that the duties of the Christian mi- nistry may be well discharged without one. They have reason to know, and they feel, that without other support than the spontaneous offerings of a grateful people, and with no expectations but those which are placed beyond the grave, these S duties have been performed with diligence, with zeal, with unexampled self-devotion. Exalted as is the calling of a Christian pastor, it does not so completely lift him. above humanity, as to exempt him from the influence of those circum- stances which mould the character of other men ; he- enjoys no special privilege to be rich, and to despise wealth ; to be great and to be meck of heart ; to enjoy those things that make the world delightful, without occasionally forgetting, or at least regretting, that it is not his home for ever, That the public endowment of a religion may be useful in a political point of view, I shall nei- ther deny or assert; all I contend for is, that the scriptures do not require it, and that it is not ne- - cessarily an object of ambition.to those who haye adopted them as their guide. It suffices for my purpose to shew, that to believe in christianity, and to desire a political establishment for ‘its ministers, are things. so totally distinct, that from the exist. ence of the one you could not, without reference to experience, infer the existence -of the: other. How far history, which is éxperience, warrants such an inference, will be the subject of a subsequent mquiry. f If, therefore, the Roman Catholics are to be accused of this ambition, by. reason of their reli- gion, and if it cannot be attributed to the general doctrine of christianity which they hold in com- mon with the other,members of the christian fa- 6 mily, it must, to justify the accusation, be traced to something peculiar to their faith ; but is there any thing peculiar to their faith to which it can be traced? Examine it article by article, and no- thing of that nature will appear; but in going through the process of examination, you must take care not to attribute to them any article that they disclaim : it will not do to say that the Ca- tholic church adopted a particular article some centuries ago, and that as the Catholic believes his church to be immutable, he must believe the ar- ticle to thisday. If all the steps in this kind of reasoning were true, it would only prove that the Catholic was guilty of a logical absurdity ; but by no means does it prove that he believes the article disclaimed. ‘To ascertam whether he does not, you have no other means than his own confession ; for it is notorious that men do not always assent to con- clusions justly drawn from premises they admit. Human opinions are not placed in the mind in regular succession like mathematical truths, of which each is elaborated from the preceding, and consequently consistent with all the rest; they are received in isolated masses unconnected with each other, and uncompared; most of them with- dut any proof, and very few pursued to their re- sults. When we would demonstrate to another person the truth of any opinion, we do nothing else but shew that it is regularly deducible from some other which he admits. And is there a man, - to whose experience it has not come home, that deductions of this kind, which seemed to him as Pr TE i g clear as the noon'day, haye failed in convincing others? Every failure of this kind is an irrefrag- able proof of the injustice of those men who. at- tribute to a Catholic opinions which he disclaims, because they seem to them to be convertible into, or follow from those that he acknowledges. The truth is, that with the generality of man- kind every species of assent is more matter of habit than of reasoning. ‘‘ It belongs rather to the sensitive than to the cogitative part of our na- ture ;’? if it be so, we should not wonder that doctrines which clash with human instincts should be repudiated by human beings, although a subtle logician deduce them from riotions that they hold. You may object, that to abide by men’s own avowal or denial of their opinions exposes us to. deception: it unquestionably does, but we have no better mode of ascertaining them. God has not thought proper to give us any other; he has reserved for his own scrutiny the secret folds and recesses of human thoughts, from which, if man were humble, he would learn that his jurisdic- tion does not reach thein. But it is useless to labour at this point. It is very evident in itself, ard it is admitted by those of_our opponents who have taken the most pains with our question, by Mr. Peel and Mr. Foster. Mr. Foster indeed violates the principle he ad- mits; but Mr. Peel fairly abides by it; he goes no] ee OE) SEEM Rep ag a CTR: —. Arcana OE apy ee ee” —- Se _ —_— _ = — — 7 ir . a g further ; he not only gives the Catholics credit for the religious opinions which they disavow, but exonorates them from any imputations by reason of those which they acknowledge ; his words are those: ‘I will not impute to the Roman Catholic “* church any doctrines which are not avowed. I *< will give to the professors of that faith the full *‘ advantage of every disclaimer they have made. ‘«« J will suppose the Roman Catholic to have the ‘“‘ same feelings, to be influenced by the same mo- «tives, to act on the same principles as other ‘men.’ He then proceeds to state the evil which he apprehends : | *‘ Do you mean to give them that fair propor- *« tion of political power to which their numbers, ‘¢ wealth, talents and education will entitle them ? ** Tf you do, can you believe that they will remain *‘ contented with the share you assien them? Do ‘you’ think, when they become the body most “controlling the government of Ireland, as they must in process of time become, if they are con- stituted like other men, if they are sincere and zealous members of that religious persuasion which they profess ; if they believe your intru- sive church has usurped the temporalities which she possesses, do you think that they will not aspire to the re-establishment of their own church in all its ancient splendour? Is it natu- ral that they should? If I argue from my own feelings, if I place myself in their situation, | answer that it is not.??* n e¢ 6 6 wn 6 tal ¢ n ce € n 8 n” 6 n ¢ wn 6 n * Mr. Peel’s Speech, 1817, Parliamentary Register. see od c. Ss 9 This, you perceive, is a distinct admission that no designs upon the established church can be imput- ed to the Roman Catholics, by reason of any thing peculiar to their faith. Wherefore the first enqui- ry must be answered in the negative. This brings to the second, namely, whether that they entertain this desire in question, can be collected from what history records of the con- duct of sects in.general.—If we argue that any sectarian feeling is an essential attribute of man, because it happens to have prevailed among men at some former period, we expose ourselves to much error. Such an acknowledged change has taken place in the human character in every thing connected with the endowment and propagation of his own religion, and the toleration of that of others, as must preclude every argument of this sort. You might as well say, that such and such are the feel- ings and opinions of a man, because they belonged to him when achild. On every modification of sectarianism man is as superior to his former self, as manhood is to infancy. It is not denied that he has flung off a whole mass of erroneous notions and bad feelings, which once clung to him as closely as the desire to obtain a political establish- ment for his church, and which were consequent- ly as well entitled to be ranked among the attri- butes of his nature. ‘That the idolator should die the death, was the universal cry from the ‘Tiber to the ‘Tweed ; from the shore of the Oronoko, where the Christian hunted down the heathen to the banks of the Mississipi, where he was in his turn 10 hunted by another Christian. Is it on that ac- count to be regarded as a fixed principle of human nature that man should put the idolator to death ? However Knox, Pole, Cranmer, Calvin, Mary or Elizabeth, may have differed on other points, im this they all concurred, that it was meritorious to exterminate by the sword the errors which reason- ing could not remove. ‘This was the then funda- mental article of belief, the only one perhaps upon which Christians have been unanimous. Is it therefore to be classed among the immutable dis- positions of human nature ? History has been suf- ficiently ransacked for topics of mutual accusation. If searched with a better spirit, we might find oc- casion for a more charitable office, that of mutual congratulation on the improvement we have all of | us undergone. But upon no subject does it enable us to felicitate ourselves with more heartfelt pride than on the alteration that has taken place in that ambition for our sect, or zeal, or whatever name is to be given to the false estimate of. the duty we owe to our religion, which once universally pre- vailed. Some men, from spleen to the living ra- ther than veneration for the dead, are fond of ce- lebratmg the superior wisdom and virtue of our fathers. Without wishing to depreciate their me- rit, [ cannot but think that we are wiser and better than they were ; in every thing that can be resolved into fanaticism, I am . —_ ~ . weet 5 aes rs gam ta a a —— oe 3 : SS ae en ee E ea aa en Se ——~— eel 16 at last grown weary. ‘Ihe lower départments of the law, the magistracy, the navy, the army, are open to the talents and enterprise of the Catholic ; and although his situation is still very remote from the condition which awaits him, and which it is reasonable he should attain, yet compared with his former state of ignominy and proscription, it is the most liberal toleration. As far, then, as the apprehension that the Ro- man Catholics will endeavour to subvert the tem- poral establishments of the church in favour of their sect is justified upon the evidence of history, the question will stand thus: we find that a tribe of opinions and feelings concerning the pre-eminence of our own, and the toleration of other sects, have prevailed for many ages, in every country, among all religions; but we also find that they are now universally abandoned and detested. The disposi- tion imputed to the Roman Catholics is a*medifica- tion of those principles that have thus confessedly been relinquished. It relates to the same object, and where it exists it has usually the same purposes in view. Ido not say it is always as culpable or as pernicious. as the exploded principles we speak of, though in the case of the Roman Catholics of this country, I think it would; but it differs from them rather in degree than in kind. — Is it not then un- reasonable to say that the Roman Catholics must wish to-have tithes and titles for their pastors, be- cause these things were desired by men from whom they are confessedly so dissimilar? If partial 17 ghmpses of history were sufficient to enable us to judge of what is natural to man, we might as rea- sonably contend that Protestants and Catholics shall always thirst for each other’s blood, as that they shall always desire to connect their religion with the state : for viewed in detached portions, and uncorrected by modern experience, history would certainly prove both; but taking it as it should be, on the large scale which alone renders it instructive, it proves neither. The utmost which it establishes is this, that all those malignant dispositions are accidental, but not essential properties of man; that they are subject to increase and diminution, but that for many ages they have been on the wane, and are now sinking -in obscurity: let us hope, for ever. | The truth is, that the arguments drawn against the Catholics and other sectaries from history, rest upon an, assumption which is falsified by history itself. “é assume an immutability in the disposi- tions and passions of men, which history proves to have no existence. It is proper to brutes to trans- mit their instincts unchanged to successive genera- tions, but man is by his nature a progressive crea- ture, whose views enlarge with the accumulation of his knowledge ; his mind opens with his condi- tion; his character and his habits experience the vissitudes of his fortune: like the elemental par- ticles of matter, which are supposed by philoso- phers to be unaltered in- the various combinations to which they can be moulded by art or accident, ¢ =... 18 the primary principles of human action, our self- love, or pride, or whatever name is to be given to the original passions of our nature, may remain the same at all times and under all circumstances : but the objects to which we are impelled by these pas- sions, the things which are to minister to our self- love and pride, are any thing but immutable. Tt will always be the character of man to reach at what he considers to be his interest, to aim at the esteem of his fellow creatures, to be susceptible of great enthusiasm, and to identify himself with great combinations of his fellow creatures; but it is contrary to all experience to suppose that he shall always form the same estimate of his interest, that his enthusiasm shall always kindle for the same causes, or that the combinations of his fellow men, with which he will confound his fortunes, and to which he will transfer his sympathies, shall be al- ways put and held together by the same princi- ples. Similarity of colour, of descent, of language, of political feeling, of religion and of country, have cach in their turn been the connecting prin- ciple of these combinations among men. A man of colour or a white, a Greek ora barbarian, a Guelph or a Ghibiline, a Papist or a heretic, a royalist or a democrat, have each at some time or place been prevailing appellations, and have de- noted the principles of associations offensive and defensive, to which whatevér existed of public sentiment was for the time directed. But of all the principles upon which men have ever been formed into these confederations, similarity of pun e Nae country is the best, and -that- of religion is the worst; for exclusive love ef our country. only. li- mits the sphere of our. affections, but does not change their nature: within its boundaries there is abundant scope for all the charities of the human heart. But division by religion not only contracts the range of our good will, but sours and corrodes it; it not merely cuts the web of human. society into distinct pieces, but it shoots through its.entire length and in every direction, and defaces the tex- ture of every part. Divide the human. race as you please, some animosities and displeasures. will grow from their division; but the animesities which are incidental to division by country, are af- fection itself in comparison’. with those which : spring from divisions by religion; for the indivi- duals whom diversity of country dissociates in in- terest are for the most part separated» by space, and can only contemplate each other in the ab- stract—whereas, when the division: is effected upon the principle of religion, the dissociated) in- , dividuals meet and shock in daily life. They hate each other, not with the imbecility of public senti- ment, but with the force and individuality of personal aversion. But although division by coun- try is unquestionably the si implest and most per- manent; the classes into which it distributes men are not immutable; they. vary, like all the rest, in their extent andin the duties they inspire; there is scarcely a state of Europe that does not consist of parts which were once unconnected with, and.only know each other for the purpose of ri- c2 20 valry and detestation: and there is scarcely an age of the world in which men have not changed in their opinions of the duty they owed their coun- try. At one period it is considered superior, and at the next inferior to every other obligation ; at one time the natural affections which spring from blood and kindred are studiously extinguished, that nothing may interfere with our devotion to our country : at another the duties imposed by the pri- vate relations are alone valued, and all pretension to others mocked at as hypocrisy or folly. When all other human combinations are thus changing, and when the passions they excite are all suscepti- ble of these vicissitudes, why should we suppose that leagues founded upon identity of religion should alone be permanent, or expect that the no- tions of what it is our duty to do for them, should continue for ever without change? I see no better - reason why men should, be prevented from amal- gating together, and coalescing for the great pur- poses of their being, by differences in religion, than by the other differences of which they have outlived the dissociating power: and I must avow, that when I compare the scanty means with which human genius had hitherto took for the union of mankind, with the mighty instruments, physical and moral, which it has of late acquired ; when I contemplate the cuases of dissociation, which in spite of these scanty means it has already over- come, and which were’seemingly more insuperable than those which yet remain to be subdued ; when I reflect’ upon the difficulties of intercourse ed which the arts have vanquished, the multitude of languages that have perished, the local prejudices and the diversity of creeds and customs which time and mutual interest have rendered ineffica- cious, I cannot but see, that there is something better than mere benevolence in the philosophy which teaches, that the causes of division shall con- tinue to diminish as they have done heretofore, and the circle of the human affections shall con- tinue to enlarge until it embraces in its wide ex- panse every former class of the human racc. But you may say that this doctrine of the mu- table disposition of one Species would take from history a great portion of her utility and dignity. To what purpose, you will perhaps ask, do we re- sort to the record of the past, to learn how man should be governed now or hereafter, if he be so variable, so unlike himself, at different times and periods? The answer is very obvious. We resort to history to learn how the variations in the hu- man passions and affections are produced. We read it that we may discover the causes and the course of discipline by which the human mind is formed to good or evil. But of all the great les- sons which it teaches upon this point, that which it behoves us most to know, that which is exemplified by the most terrible experience, is, that whatever is formidable in religious zeal can only be subdued by lenity and neglect. ‘That persecution of every kind, whether it coerce the body or the mind, whether it assumes the form of a gibbet or a penal SS ee Ss) 96 Q law, begets fanatism exactly in proportion to its se- verity. Whatif you diminish the persecution, the fanatism which it-caused’ ‘diminishes in the same proportion; and that if-you put an end to the per- secution perfectly and entirely, the fanatism ceases as completely and as entirely. -If we are sincere in our desire to learn from history, it teaches (to use words of Montesquiet) ’‘* that to overthrow any ‘‘ religion, we must assail it by the good things of ‘‘the world, and by the hopes of fortune ;° not ‘“‘ by that which makes men remember it,’ but by ‘‘ that which causes them to forget it; not by ‘that which’ outrages mankind, but’ by every ‘¢ thing which soothes them, and. facilitates: the “other passions of humanity in obtaining predo- ‘«mimence over religion.” Penal Jaws, says that great man, have got their terrors ; but religion has her terrors also, and men have pride. Between the fears of religion and the dread of shame, the human mmd becomes capable of every thing. *« Les ames deviennent.atroces.’’ This is the real lesson of experience : it teaches to suffer religious zeal to waste itself away by its natural ebullition—to permit it to spend itself in the empty air freely and without check: it is thus feeble and innocuous; the more ‘intense its heat the sooner it} 1s consumed : ‘but ‘if you venture to confine it, to restrain it from the expansion for which it strives, you render it, by the reaction of your effort to compress it, the most formidable agent in the moral world. 23 But it may be said, that it is not-upon.the,au- thority of history alone that these hostile disposi- tions are imputed to the Catholics ;—those who make the imputation allege, that every man must. be conscious to himself, that in their condition he would feel them: they desire every one who doubts the truth of this assertion, to make the!ex:. periment upon himself; to imagine himselfvin their condition, and examine his own heart. whe- ther it be net inevitable, that he should endeavour to restore his church to her former splendour. This brings us to the third enquiry 1 had pro- posed. The Catholics do not object to this. mode. of ascertaining their future dispositions.: To ascer- tain how men will act and feel in a giyen condi- tion, by making that condition our own, is, in general, no bad formula in calculcations on human nature ; but it requires to be used with caution, for the slightest error in. its application, will be enormously multiplied in the result : to use it with advantage, we must take care that we place. our- selves in the exact condition of which we seek to find the influence on our feelings and opinions, and not in any other. If, out-of the many and counteracting circumstances of which every condi- ion. is composed, we only, contemplate a few, and those few of the same tendency, it is clear, that-in effect we contemplate a situation different from the one which was proposed to be examined!; and of which, consequently, the mfluence on our dispo- 24: sitions must be different. A particular mode of feeling may appear naturally and inseparably con- nected with the one which would be quite unnatu- ral in the other. If the condition of the Catho- lics was that of a people forming a new country, of which they were the majority, and which had to select a state religion for the first time, without any motive to guide their preference but the partiality which men feel for their own opi- nions, they would unquestionably choose their own ; but this would not be the condition of the Catholics—nothing could be more unlike it: the the Catholics would find themselves in the midst of a mighty empire, whose institutions were already formed and consolidated by long standing, and they would be but a small portion of that empire: they would find the political establishment pre-oc- cupied by another church, which was secured in her enjoyment of it by every thing that gives strength and permanence to national institutions : - they would find her fortified by the number, talent and activity of those who were more immediately in her service, by her powerful alliances with every order of the state, by the reasonable pre- sumption of better right, which long possession earries with it ; by the religious veneration of which she was the object, and by the general attachment to civil liberty with which her security is supposed to be entwined, which she immediately preceded, if she did not cause ; with which she-was assailed, and with which she triumphed. They would find her in strict alliance, offensive and defensive, with Pre. 25 the throne—presenting an immeasurable range of patronage to the monarch, ever ready to support those interests which he especially represents, and receiving, in return, the well-earned: meed of the most strenuous protection. They would find her in strict alliance with the whole order of the nobles, raising the younger branches of their houses into equality with their parent stem, reviving the decay- ed splendour of ancient families or elevating to the patrician rank, by the munificence of her rewards and herdignities, the pious, the learned, and the for- tunate. They would find that she controlled no con- temptible part of the third legislative estate, and that her prelates were an essential portion of the se- cond: they would. find her subordinate employ- ments ready filled by thousands from every order of the state, all men of education, and, for the most part, of those habits which give the posses- sors influence in society: they would perceive as many thousands more, waiting and qualifying themselves with great labour and expense, to be their successors. In a word, they would scarce- ly find a respectable family in the country of which a member does not enjoy, in possession or expectation, some portion of her princely reve- nues and titles. To all the persons influenced by such direct and powerful motives to uphold the church, there must be added, to form an estimate of her strength, four-fifths of the empire who were educated in her doctrines ; mostly under the immediate direction of her ministry, and many of the most efficient for attack or for defence at the 26 venerable seats of learning where she presides. The Catholics would find all these men of all these orders and conditions combined, and justly combined against them, for the defence of the Protestant’ church establishment.. Would they combine for the attack ? Could they hope for, could they be so mad as to expect success? Could they expect: it without interminable bloodshed and a civil war, which could be no other than of exter- mination ? Could they think to triumph. in that eivil war? Would they risk what they enjoyed upon so desperate an adventure ? Time must roll back to the ages of the crusades, before men shall be guilty of such frenzy... Let any honest. Protes- tarit then place himself in the condition of the Ro- man Catholies ; let him: consider the impossibility of success; the signal and merited vengeance’ that awaits failure; the ferocious’ strife that. must at any rate ensue, be the triumph whose it may ; the ‘expenditure of human blood. and. happiness that must take place: let him consider that he had sworn to maintain the church he was. assail- ing, and that it was through the liberality and ge- nerous confidence of her followers: that he found himself in a situation to do injury. | Let any Pro- testant put himself fairly in this the true, condi- tion of the Catholic, under these multitudinous motives to remain quiet ;. impelled by the single motive, religious zeal, to disturb the public peace, and we shall abide by his report.of what is natural to that condition. I do not believe that there is a man in the country but Mr. Peel (and I would 7 4 t not believe it of him but that he has declared it) who in such a condition would think of ‘* re- ‘* storing his church to her ancient splendour.’’* The mistake through which men are betrayed into such errors respecting the effects of religious zeal, is very much aggravated by this; they form to themselves some notions of the force of that principle estimated by itself, and they calculate its effects upon the human conduct, without taking into consideration the counteracting and miodify- ing powers under the joint impulse of which we act. They take a single force into the moral sys- tem, and they argue that man riust move its di- rection, without regarding that his track is the combined result of many powers impelling us many ways. Even if it were proved that religious zeal, as far as it had influence, would prompt the Caz tholic in Pazliament to obtain a political establish- ment for his ciureh, it would not in reason follow that he should be excluded, if, according to the ordinary rules of hi:man conduct, they would not yield to it; and most assuredly they would not yield to suggestions which are in opposition: to all the other properties and passions of human nature---to common honesty, to the love of ease, of happiness, of safety, of our country. It is a doctrine repugnant to every thing like confidence in public affairs which would teach us that a man, who belongs to an order in which he has * Vide Mr. Peel’s Speech in 1817, and page ante. 28 the slightest interest distinct from his fellow-citi- zens, is never to be trusted with their concerns. There is scarcely a man in the community that is not so circumstanced. If his share in the uni- versal weal prevail over his partial interest, the state is sufficiently secured, though he were dis- honest ; but it is monstrous to presume that every man is a fanatic or a rascal. That this principle of religious fanaticism, or whatever it is to be called, is not an essential part of the human character; or if it be that it is over-ruled in the ordinary condition of Society by the ordinary motives of human nature, does not rest upon theory alone. It is proved by the his- tory of England and of Ireland. From the time of the revolution to the present day, not one well attested, unequivocal instance of an ‘attempt hav- img been made on the established church, either in or out of parliament, under the influence of reli- gious zeal, is to be found: and yet such was the constitution of the parliaments of England and of Ireland during that period, that this principle, which urges us to obtain an ascendancy for our church, must have been called into activity among the dissenters, if it existed, or was not suppressed by other and better feelings ; for those parliaments were composed of Protestants who hated the kirk, nd of Presbyterians who hated the church with with as much Christian detestation as the Catho- lics ever felt for either. If any man question the assertion, let him look to the history of the last 29 century; let him look into the repeated and inef- fectual efforts that have been made in England to repeal the test act ; let him read the debates which took place upon these occasions, and let him remember the outrages which they occasioned in various parts of England; let him read the politi- cal pamphlets of the first half of the last century, especially of the Tories, and of Swift especially among the Tories: but in despite of the animosity which these things testify’ to have existed be- tween the dissenters and the church of England, the Presbyterians of England and Ireland were admitted into a full participation of the power of the state with the Protestants. In Ireland, by a permanent legislative provision; in England, by temporary expedients, which conferred all the power which the greatest confidence could have given, and which, perpetuating the hatred which confidence would have soothed, did every thing that was possible to render that power dangerous ; but, in spite of these fears, and of this hatred, the Presbyterians of Scotland have shared the le- gislation of England since the Union. The realm of Scotland, with her kirk,‘ has been sub- jected to a parliament in England, of which the majority was Protestant. How came it to pass, if it be a necessary principle of human nature, that we should endeavour to establish our church wherever we can, that the Protestants of England did not endeavour to establish the Episcopal ‘Church in Scotland, and that the Presbyterians of England and of Scotland did not endeayour te ———— ~ BAST TS ae _ es A Se 8) GO to abolish episcopacy in England? How came it te pass that the Presbyterians of Ireland, who were as numerous as the Protestants, did not en- deavour to establish the government of elders in this country ?* If it be principle of human nature that * Dean Swift wrote several treatises to prove that if the sa- cramental test acts were repealed in Ireland, the Dissenters would destroy the national church. His arguments are al- most word for word the same as those used by Mr, Foster and Mr. Peel against the Catholics; but notwithstanding the co- gency of his reasoning, the test acts were repealed, and zn point of fact, the Dissenters made no, attempt upon the esta- blished church. I cannot refrain from transcribing a few of the observations which, after being falsified by experience, as applied to the Presbyterians, are now made to bear upon the Roman Catholics. “ If we might,” says Swift, «be allowed to ‘«< judge for ourselves, we had abundance of benefit by the ‘“‘ sacramental test, and foresee a number of mischiefs would “‘be the consequence of repealing it.—But, if you please, ‘J will tell you the great objection we have against the re- *« peal of the sacramental test; it is that we are verily per- *¢ suaded the consequence will be an entire change of religion “‘ among usin no great compass of years. And pray observe « how we reason in Ireland upon this matter,” &c. and then he alleges that ae earn of the north were superced- ing the precisely inthe way whigh Mr. Foster states the Catholics are now overruning-t rotentn . ants ; he speaks of their mutual adherence, and their perpetual efforts to squeeze out any detached Protestant, who has the misfortune to find himself among them. In another’ part of the same letter: “‘ If the consequence of repealing this clause (the “‘ sacramental test) should at some time or other enable ‘the Presbyterians to work themselves up into’ the national “* church, instead of making Protestants unite, it would sow “ eternal divisions among them, &c.—Neither is it difficult to “conjecture, from seme late proceedings, at what rate these fa- ‘‘natics (meaning the Presbyterians) are likely to drive when- = SS ee al ae er = Eras Na st pes. =e « ~ abe = a sont 31 men must endeavour to establish their own church in every country, how does it happen that. the Protestant Parliament, Protestant King, and Pro- testant ministers of England, do not at once abo- lish the Catholic establishment of Canada? Will be said that the Act of Union with Scotland, the Act of Settlement in England and in Ireland, and the treaty by which Canada was ceded her, guarded against these things? This is precisely what I contend for: that this dreaded zeal for the establishment of our religion may be kept down by other means than power ; that it may be, and has been, and is corrected by better feelings, more po- tent in their influence, and more congenial to hu- manity ; that it is effectually subdued by common honesty, by the faith of treaties, without sanction and contracts with imaginary existences; and would there be wanting to the Catholic powerful motives to bind him to his duty? Is he alone proof against the operation. of public opinion, “ever they get the whip and seat. hey have already set “ un courts of judicature tn open contempt of the lates«—They ‘‘ send missionaries every where in order to HRW @™Mmverts, « &c,—And what'practices such principles as-these (with many “ others that might be’ invidious to. mention) may spawn when * laid outsin the sin, you may determine at leisure.” A letter concerning the sacramental test; it is unnecessary to point out the parallel passages in the modern speeches. These were the errors of Swift; but he has an excuse for hig errors which those who now use his arguments, refuted as they have beeii‘by time, cannot plead, want of experience concerning the effect of toleration. Politics is a science of experiment, and Swift could not be blamed for being ignorant of what has only been found by experiment subsequent to his time, 32 against the calls of gratitude, against sensibi- lity to the reproach of broken faith? Would not the Act of Union of Scotland with England, and of Ireland with both, would not the acts of settle- ment in these kingdoms be as binding upon the Catholic as they have been found to be upon the other dissenters of the nation, corroborated as these acts would be with respect to the Roman Catholic, by the power m the offended party to punish and retaliate, by the certainty of failure, and the terror of the inevitable vengeance that must attend it? And the truth of these princ- ples is established in other histories as well as ours. How many, many generations of Mahomedan so- vereigns have reigned over Hindostan without in- terfering with its religion ? In Saxony the Court is Catholic and almost absolute, and the religion of the country is Lutheran. Does the King of Sax- ony endeavour to establish Popery in its place? Ef venture to say that he is indifferent to the matter, and that he would be better pleased to recover his lost dominions from-his cousin of Prussia, than to restore the. Catholic religion in his country ‘ to all her former splendour.”’ And to what are we to attribute this absence of ambition for their religion in the sovereigns of India and of Europe? To the same feelings which extinguish it in this country ; to common prudence, to a salutary foresight of the evils to which it must conduct them, and above all, to that wise indifference which we ‘soon learn to fcel for any object which clashes with our inte- rests. For it is not to be overlooked, that these common motives of human life not only prevent 38 the action of religious zeal, but extinguish it alto. gether. Man so loathes the consciousness of hay- ing neglected his duty, that whatever course of action his interests or necessities have induced him to pursue fora length of time, is ultimately re- garded by him, unless it be directly contrary to some great principle of morality, as that which it is most fit and honourable to follow. He feels it so. pleasant to reflect that he has acted as he should, and so painful to think the contrary, that his con- science makes. prodigious efforts to approve of whatever he has done; and if it be at all capable of a favourable construction, it is sure to receive it at the easy and good-natured tribunal which tries it. These are the principles and the conduct that are natural to man, and not that destructive dispo- sition which would tear asunder the human race into as many hostile factions as there are differences of opinion : it is natural to man to love his coun- try and his fellow creatures, to feel and to dis- charge the duties of the multitudimous relations, natural and constituted, in which he stands—to bear himself with propriety as a brother, a son, a father, a citizen, a magistrate, a member of a par- ticular profession or class-in the community to which he belongs, as well as in his character of a follower of a particular sect. Man has been so won- derfully adapted to his condition (what is there in the universe which is not adapted to its purpose ?) that the duties which spring from that condition D SA: usually fortify each other: if ever they happen to clash, the stronger vanquishes the feebler, or as- suages it to good. If his duty to his favoured sect urge him to an enterprise dangerous to his country and himself, his attachment to that country, his affection for his children, his anxiety for their wel- fare, and all the other feelings imecidental to the different relations of social man, start up to keep him quiet; ‘* they are hostages’? which nature has taken from him, to answer for his peaceable demeanour. If beings can be imagined without other feelings than religious zeal, divested of all the other attributes of men, we might expect the worst results from their differing in religion. We might pronounce that it must for ever keep them in estrangement from each other: but such beings are mere creatures of the fancy that are not and have not been; it is only in highly distem- pered and transitory conditions of society, that any thing at all like it has been known. A ma- thematician shall draw imaginary lines which ap- proach, and yet produced ad znjfinitum, shall never touch; but for this purpose he must deprive them of all the qualities of really existing lines; their breadth, their thickness, their solidity, must be re- jected or his theorem will be false ; but you cannot - strip man of his properties in this way : it would be a very useless-system of ethics that rested upon pos- tulates, which required that you should consider man ashe is not; the object of that science is man as he exists, with all the qualities and attributes of 36 real life about him, with his virtues as well as his crimes, with all the dispositions that keep him aloof from his fellow-creatures, but also with those wants and habitudes which draw him. into contact and co- hesion with their interests. if we contemplate man upon these principles, we shall find him naturally averse to revolutions, and to all great changes that compromise his peace; he has so much to lose, so long to suffer, general utility presents itself so indistinctly to his eye, his indivi- dual interests are seen with such clearness and pre- cision, the confusion and horror of civil strife are so appallig, that no revolution has ever occurred to which men were net driven by the most intolerable oppression ; wrongs accumulated until human na- ture can no longer bear them, or the most desperate fanaticism, engendered by the bloodiest persecu- tions are barely sufficient to produce that phrenzy, that wrecklessness of consequences, and enthusiasm of self-devotion, which must have strung our hearts to desperation before we can think of ‘effecting a great national revolution. Let the calumniators of mankind and their oppressors say what they will, chains and bolts are not required to coerce us into quiet ; let them torture history as they please, they will find no instances of great commotions in a, state without the most irresistible exasperation : civil wars may have been waged by contending no- bles, who led their feudal vassals into the field as contending princes lead their armies: exiled princes have endeavoured to regain the thrones D2 36 they forfeited, and some of their former subjects have assisted them. from hope, from gratitude, from a sense of duty: but a movement properly called national, has never taken place without a provocation commensurate with the nagnitude of the evil: without the grossest provocation no com- motion has been witnessed like that of the Jacque- ries in England and in France ;_ the revolution of 1688, the French revolution, the American, or the countless rebellions which form the tissue of Irish story, or the more desperate strife which an attempt on the part of the Roman Catholics to establish their religion must excite. I have now enquired into three of the four grounds upon which it seems to me possible that the sole pretence of disfranchising the Catholics could be supported. I now proceed to the fourth enquiry I had proposed, namely, whether any thing to justify it could be found in the character which the Catholics have exhibited in the pursuit of their claims ? It has frequently been said that the insatiability with which they have pressed from the acquisition of one political privilege to the demand of another, furnishes reason to apprehend that when they have obtained their present object they will look for something else. ‘* Their demands, it is observed, *«* have been uniformly progressive ; ‘every conces- «¢ sion has been made the occasion of a new claim ; ‘* first, they obtained the right of taking lands on * lease, and afterwards in fee ; then the elective 37 ‘* franchise, and the: practice of the law; they ‘* now demand accession to the Bench, and Parlia- ‘ment: Yield to their demands, and (following ** the course they have hitherto pursued) they will “ require your Bishoprics and Church livings.’? The least reflection will shew the unreasonable- ness of this mode of reasoning. What the Catho- lics have hitherto sought, and are now seeking, is essentially distinct from that which. it -is ap- prehended they wz// aim at. But all the privileges which they have hitherto successively obtained, and are now seeking for, are of one nature and description : they are all, as well what they have as what they have not, so intimately connected with each other, that the enjoyment of one draws to it the desire of the others. The power to pur- chase property and to transmit it to our succes- sors, to hold honourable and lucrative employ- ments, to try our fortunes in the army, and exer- cise our -talents at the bar, to possess the privi- lege of free citizens at elections, to sit in parlia- ment when our property or our talents qualify us for that honour, are privileges so obviously of the same nature, that if you indulge a man with one he immediately seeks another. Let sophists dis- tinguish between them as they please, alleging that the enjoyment of some of these privileges is toleration, and of others the possession of political power, they are all of acommon nature; they have all a common origin, and are directed toa common object, the necessities and happiness of man: they are, without distinction, the artificial a_i 38 creatures of society, from the seat in the legisla- ture to the right of holding property : ‘they are all parcels of the advantages which a citizen of Kng- land receives for the surrender of those immu- nities which jurists say they would have possessed in what they call a state of nature. From these advantages a multitude of citizens are excluded by means of their religion: it is natural they should endeavour to recover them, and having obtained one, should after a little time demand another ; and accordingly they have done so. But it does not follow that the man who has done this must necessarily entertai: any wish for the aggrandise- ment of his sect: he betrays his love of political power if you please, but nothing like a desire to have a national endowment for his church. He may be impatiently desirous of the political privi- leges he seeks, and be perfectly indifferent to the temporal condition of his religion. The desire of political privileges and of sectarian aggrandisement are totally distinct passions; the existence of one does not imply the existence of the other. They may co-exist in the same person, or they may not, most frequently they do not. This objection against the Catholics is founded upon an error in pomt of fact. It supposes that what they now seek is for the benefit of their religion : it is not; they have never sought any thing for their reli- gion ;, they have demanded that they should mot suffer on account of their religion, but they have never required that it should entitle them to any thing. They pray that they, a number of British sub- ———————————— ——— 39 jects, should have the privileges of that character, not in virtue or by reason of their religion, but 7 spite of it. They do not ask that it should entitle any man, whether priest or layman, to any advantage, but that it be not a bar to any other title he may have: they claim no merit or privilege by reason of being Catholics, but they require that their other merits may not be prejudiced by that cir- cumstance. Religion has no farther connexion with other political privileges that they seek, than as far as it is made and has become the instrument and the name by which they are deprived of them. If they were excluded by any other name or means, as deseendants of Milesius, for example, or believers in the miracles of St. Patrick, they would be equally importunate. ‘They would in that case pray that their political merits might be estimated without any reference to their descent, or their belief in the power of the saint, as they now desire that they may be weighed without any regard to their religion. ‘Their request may be reasonable or unreasonable, but in neither does it furnish matter for an inference that they desire an establishment for their religion. If they enter- tain this desire, it must be proved by something more than their desire of political privilege, which is a thing totally distinct. Unless, indeed, it be said that to suffer political privations, which we might avoid by relinquishing our religion, proves such a strong attachment to it as necessarily implies a wish to gain it a political establishment : which is foolish to excess; fora map who knows 40 any thing of human nature must be aware that te suffer on account of a religion does not prove the sincerity of our attachment to it, nor does the sincerity of our attachment prove a desire to give it a legal incorporation and endowment. Any one who knows the Roman Catholies of Ireland ¢an aitest, that on no consideration would they give their clergy a public stipend of any kind. There is nothing they hold in greater abhorrence ; whether reasonably or unreasonably is a matter of dispute, but the fact itself cannot be ques- tioned. ‘They behold them in circumstances of unostentatious mediocrity, equally remote from the pomp of wealth and the squalidness of poverty, subsisting on a revenue, which being demanded as a right to which they are entitled by their labours, is received without the humiliation of an eleemosy- nary donation ; but being a right which the law will not enforce, 1s given without the acrimony which accompanies the payment of what it enables us to exact. They behold their clergy zealous, pious, and efficient, surpassing in all the christian virtues the Catholic clergy of those coun- tries which have endowments. They make the same observation among the sectaries whose cler- gy are dependants on the esteem and good will of their flocks. ‘They attribute a great deal of this superior virtue in their pastors to'the nature and the quality of their revenues, and they are there- fore averse to alter them. What connexion is there between their obtaining the common privi- lege of a citizen and their changing their opinions 44 on this subject? Why, because they shall be no longer oppressed must they wish to corrupt. their clergy by excessive wealth? Why, because they are no longer oppressed themselves must they think of oppressing others? And by what name less odious than oppression, could we stigmatize the offence the Catholics would be guilty of if they attempted to deprive the established clergy . of the temporalities which they have purchased by most valuable considerations ; by laborious studies, by the exercise of valuable interest, by the surren- der of other pursuits, and the abandonment of the mearis of earning their bread in any other walks ? Or supposing that these deprivations could be effected in a way that would not amount to robbery, why should this desire of an alteration in the state follow upon their endeavour to obtain the common privileges of citizens ? I am aware that you may think that although these considerations may satisfy us, that there is not sufficient reason to’ apprehend that Roman Catholics will assail the Established Church ;_ yet that it cannot be pretended they have the same motives to uphold it by which the Protestants are actuated. To which I answer, that they have the same motives to uphold it as other dissenters, and the same as sway no small portion of the Protestants by whom it is preserved, namely, the same motives - of public policy: they, as well as Protestants or Dissenters, may feel a strong conviction that an Established Church is necessary to the monarchy, 42 and that the establishment in being answers that purpose as well, and has possession to plead in preference to, any other. Let people write as they please of religious zeal, it is by agency of se- cular motives that men rally round the church. Whenever these motives cease to operate, the reli- gious zeal that still continues in the country will not maintain the church a single day. If the country shall ever be of opinion that her ecclesias- tical establishments are political evils; that they are not necessary to the monarchy, or that the monarchy is not necessary to the public good, “ the Church will fall.” I do not mean that her doc- trines shall no longer be believed, but her earthly honours will be shorn: her temporalities will be prostrated with the throne which she defends. The temporal establishment of the Church of England is one of the bulwarks of the present form of go- vernment ; though dedicated to religion, it serves the temporal exigencies of the state ; like the tem- ple of the Jews, it isa fortress anda temple. It is one of the great lines of circumvalation that encom- pass the throne; an order of hereditary nobility is the other. No, no; it is not the Catholics orthe sectaries who will destroy the Church: if doomed to fall, it will be assailed by a different class of men, who will overthrow the throne and its appendages together; it need not fear the disciplined strength of the Papal hierarchy, the impetuosity of the Methodists, the steady hatred of the Calvinists, or what a learned Doctor was wont to call the “ irre- gular and cossack warfare which is waged against it 43 by newer sects from old walls and ditches.” Alf these attacks it may defy ; but let it tremble when it is assailed by what men, according to the diver- sity of their temperament, sagacity, or circum- stances, call the spirit of philosophy, or of innova- tion. It is not from the men who teach the real presence, or the justification by mere faith, or the doctrine of election, that the solid fabric of the national church will be shaken: these disputes lost their interest ; they have become, in the esti- mation of mankind, stale and unprofitable ; it is not from these people it has to fear, but from the men who would persuade us that every thonarchy is founded upon principles essentially inimical to the welfare of mankind; who argue that in the mo- narchial form of government the interest of the * ruler is frequently adverse to the interest of the subject; and that another form is practicable which shall avoid all that is noxious in a monarchy, and preserve all that is good; which shall combine the stability, the vigour, the tranquillity, the capa- | bility of extension and duration which have been hitherto thought to belong exclusively to monarchy, with establishments that shall render impossible a diversity between the interests of the ruling power and the nation ; which shall establish an identity of interests between them more com- plete than was ever attained in any republic of antiquity; it is from the men who teach these things, and point to the wealth, the freedom of America, asthe proof that they do not rave, that any thing is to be feared. If ever they succeed in ii i ; t } f a | eee peppiieinai = — —— . ~~ Sena SES —— ST me a | 44. convincing the people of England that they have reached the period of sober and discreet mar 3 when it is no longer fit that their persons and pro- perties should be given in ward to kings and aris- tocracies ; that they can manage their own con- cerns without the expensive and wasteful guar- dianship to which they have been so long com- mitted, the throne of England will be pulled down, and the church -will tumble with it: when the throne shall be cut down into an armed chair fora president of a house of congress; when, as Paine expresses it, it shall be found that all the func- tions of a king can be performed by a respectable gentleman. for £800 a-year, the bishops and archbishops will not be left in possesion of their honours.and their pomp: at such a period of close investigation.and minute economy, the tenth part not only of the land, but of human industry exer- cised upon it, may be thought too much for the established clergy. It may be considered wise, in that moment of innovation, to leave them, like us of the temporal professions, to adjust the terms of their renumeration with the persons who think pro- per to employ them. The Spenceans will be disap- pointed im their expectation of an equal partition of -the soil. But the division of the property of the . the clergy, by giving to every man the tithes of his own land, is most invitingly practicable, and may seem very desirable to the owners of that lands: Lf. it ever come to pass that by the diffu- sion of useful knowledge, by the increased facility of communication, by the freedom of discussion, 45 , by the multiplication of that class of the human race who can live without labour, and have leisure to examine, to think, to write, and by the’ consequent accumulation of informed talent that will start up in all directions for the service of the state; if by the operation of those causes, and the greater efficacy they will impart» to public opiion as a moral re- straint, moderation and public justice shall be- come so powerful amongst us that the cumbrous and expensive establishment of a royal government shall be no longer necessary to sustain: order in these countries, the throne and the church will fall together. Until this change happen they will stand. “Before such an amelioration of the public mind no good man would wish to see either shaken, and no wise man will expect it. These topics are not so foreign to the subject as they may seem. ‘To those who think that these speculations upon the progress of the public mind are founded upon truth, and that the great changes of which they treat will be beneficial to mankind, arid come to pass, all collateral enquiries like that concerning the claims of the Roman Catho- lics, which draw aside the public mind from the grand objects of its pursuits, must present them- selves in the shape of a great evil. They must regard them as impediments to that advancement of the human mind which they expect: on the other hand, to those who see nothing in these principles and the consequences which may be an- ticipated from their diffusion, but the dreams of 46 folly, or the machinations of the artful; to those that think that these expectations and prophesies originate in discontent, in disappointment, in envy, in malignity, and establish themselves only among those who are compelled by their circumstances to wish for change and perils; to such persons as these it must be evident that any thing which alienates the mind of people from the govern- ment, which causes them to view with rancour and displeasure all its movements, and misrepresent its motives, must be favourable to the diffusion of the principles which they deprecate. It is amongst those whom I have injured, or who imagine that I have injured them, (in both cases they will act in the same way) that a conspirator against my peace will look for partizans, and find them; but of this more hereafter. So far for the imclination of the Catholics to restore their church to their former splendour, and the necessity of coercion to restrain it. It was not my intention, when I began, to have said any thing as to the power they would acquire by eman- cipation to gratify this inclination ; but I cannot refrain from drawing your attention to it for a few moments. The power of a party (their spirit and cohesion being supposed the same) consists in their num- bers and political influence. As to the increase in point of numbers, I be- 47 lieve the stock of Catholics in Ireland must be kept up principally by breeding, which will go on in the same way, whatever becomes of emancipa- tion. That body may gain a few detached desert- ters here and there, but. they will also lose a few. A religion never makes rapid strides in a country where it has been long known; long acquaintance deprives it of its power on the imagination, and the imagination is its conductor. It is pretty clear that the persons who have passed in great numbers from one religion to another never investigate very deeply the merits of what they abandon_ or what they adopt: as it is obvious from their capa- city that logic had no share in their conversion, we must attribute it to the operation of grace, or to the dazzling influence of new doctrines on their imaginations. ‘The Protestants cannot apprehend that the first shall ever work against them, and as far as the Catholic religion is concerned, he is se- cure from the latter; for the Catholic religion is too familiar to the people of these countries to surprize or to amaze, to fill with new fears, or to excite new hopes. A religion that can pretend to nothing of this kind, that can proclaim no new discovery, and can only repeat threats and_pro- mises, which are now familiar, is an ordinary ob- ject which causes no species of sensation; its me- rits and demerits pass by uncanvassed and unheed- ed; a more effectual mode of stopping its progress than refutation. In addition to which we are to notice, that we are specially instructed in childhood against every religion but our own, that was then a of 48 preached. If areligion, therefore, of any stand- ing, happens to awake investigation, which it sel- dom does, it has to encounter the prejudices of in- fancy, and arguments prepared of old purposely to meet it. Therefore we find that no religious sect has ever made much progress in a country af- ter the first forty or fifty years of its introduction ; it rushes ina torrent while it is hot, but fortunately it cdols at no great distance from its crater, and becomes fixed immoveably. “Now as to the increase of wealth among the Ca- tholics, that also will go on nearly in the same way, whether they are emancipated or not. Not- withstanding several drawbacks upon their indus- try, the Catholics will continue to encrease in wealth, until the gross wealth of the country be divided between them and the Protestants in: the proportion which they constitute of the population. This is the natural course of things. But let not the Protestants imagine, that as the Catholic grows rich eZ to become poor. The wealth of a country is a perpetual course of consumption and renovation : when a’man grows rich, he does not necessarily impoverish any other; he creates a new fund of riches for himself; so that the Pro- testant is not necessarily wealthier for the poverty of the Catholic, or poorer for his wealth: the contrary is true. “If, therefore, the wealth of the Catholic body would be encreased by emancipa- tion, the gross wealth of the country would be en- creased. But is that an evil? Isit an evil in the Avernte aa ee ae = by _ saemniags 49 contemplation of those who can see no cause for the disturbances of the country, but the want of capital and employment? Is it an evil in the con- templation of those men, who say that the great body of Catholics suffer nothing by the condition they are placed in,—that to change it could only serve a dozen individuals, and leave the rest as they are ? Let them take their choice; either the pe- nal code keeps the Catholics poor, or it does not. If it does, it is an evil—if it does not, its repeal will not materially encrease their power to do mis- chief. Now, as to the political influence of the Catho- lics, suppose that as the Catholics are one-fifth of the population of the empire, that they constituted one-fifth of the House of Commons: this is a very violent supposition, which cannot be realized for a long time to come, but it must be avowed that it may ultimately arrive; let us, therefore, suppose it to have happened. Let us suppose one hundred and thirty Catholic members in the House of Commons; let us suppose every one of them to be a fanatic, and above the temptation of a good place. Let us imagine that they all felt and thought alike, and that they were all of that de- _perate class, whose only hopes are founded on the chance of revolution. Such men, it must be con- fessed, usually abound among the needy., Let us however imagine that the Catholics were an eX- ception .to this rule; let us suppose that the Ca- tholic knights of shires and borough-mongers yet to E ae ng” 50 be, were as eager for change as the hungry fol- lowers of Cataline. What could they do? Fight? They might as well do that without being m par- liament ; but perhaps by being there they could persuade the parliament to come into their views. Perhaps they could persuade “the House of Com- mons, the Lords, and the King,- to abolish the church establishment. But could they also per- suade the people of England, who are more pow- erful than the King, the Lords, andthe House of Commons? But as we are making extraordinary suppositions, let us imagine that they had also ef- fected this—what then? The nation desires a change, and they effect it. This, the only way in which the established church can be disturbed by Catholic emancipation, is certainly entitled to a place among the possibi- lities which the womb of time occasionally matures into reality. Jt is possible that by totally extin- guishing religious animosities and sectarian feel- ings, and by introducing other notions of what is beneficial to the country, that it might lead to a general consent from the whole empire to modify ' the church establishment of Ireland. ‘This is the only way in which it can by any possibility inter- fere with the established church—will it do so? Will such a change ever take place in the public feeling of Great Britain as to allow it? If it does it will be a season of great change; and though the Protestant establishment be pulled down, the Catholic hierachy will not take its place. But 1 * Or these things must be left to time; it must be a re- mote time that shall witness such a change—so re- mote that it would be absurd to think of legislat- ing for it. A legislator may and ought to make his laws with a prospect to futurity, with a view to the formation of the character of posterity, to the encrease of national wealth, to the perpetuity of commerce, to the foundation of new colonies, and so forth. These, and such like, are our only means of serving our descendants. As to taking measures to prevent them, in the third and fourth generation, from voluntarily adopting a particular measure, such as an alteration in the ecclesiastical establishment of the country, there can be nothing more absurd; they will be better able than we are to decide upon the wisdom of such a change. The world will not retrograde in intelligence ; it is our vanity that makes us think it will. We need, therefore, be under no uneasiness for the uncoersed — decisions of those who will come after us. Let us confine ourselves to our own part; let us pro- mote order, friendship, industry, wholesome emula- tion, and public spirit. Let us leave to our suc- cessors the best legacy a father can give to his sons, the example of his virtues and a good name: above all, let us take care that they may never blush for our barbarity and ignorance. If we can effect these things we shall have discharged our part in our generation, and may retire with an as- surance that posterity will do theirs; they will at least do justice to our memory. E2 1) ~ o 1 have now. examined how far it is probable that the only evil which is apprehended from emanci- pating the Catholics will occur: I shall now pro- ceed to the second part of my subject—the evils to be expected of leaving the Catholics as they now are. The Catholics are abused for calling themselves slaves ; there is no honour in the appellation, and the very assumption of an ignominious name proves how much their pride has suffered ; if it be exag- geration, it is of that ordinary description in which the wretched seem to find some alleviation of mis- fortune; but the persons who revile the Catholics for thus giving way to the bitterness of their spirit, forget that there are various kinds of slavery with various degrees of dependence on the master: in some his authority extends to life or limb ; im others it is limited to imprisonment or stripes; in more mitigated forms, it does not reach beyond the la- bour of the slave, and the right to the produce of his industry. Now, certainly, the condition of the Catholic is not slavery in this sense of the word: he cannot be hanged without a trial, though Mr. Burke thought they ran a greater risk of the gal- lows than other men ;* neither is he deprived of * « The exclusion fromthe law, from Grand Juries, from Sheriffships and Under-Sheriffships, as well as from the Freedom of the Corporations, may subject them to severe hardships, as it may exclude them wholly from all that is beneficial, and expose them to all that is mischievous in a trial by jury. This was manifestly within my own observa- n ¢ 6¢ n ¢ c¢ 6¢ Ka ID the fruit of his own industry, except so far as it is taken away by a Parliament from which he is ex- cluded, and forced into channels from which it never can return to him, which Mr. Burke also con- siders a great hardship ;* but there is such a thing * a tion; for 1 was three times in Ireland, from 1760 to 1767, when I had sufficient means of information concerning the inhuman proceedings, among which were many cruel mur- ders, besides an infinity of outrages and oppressions (un- known before in ‘a civilized age) which prevailed during “ n “ “ a “ N that period, in consequence of a~.pretended ‘conspiracy ‘* among Roman Catholics against the King’s government.” A letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws against the Roman Catholics, 1782. Since that time it is to be observed that the exclusion from Grand Juries and Corporations has ceased to exist in law, though in practice the Roman Catholics are with difficulty admitted to any corporations, to none in due proportions, and to the principal, that of the city of Dublin, not at all, The other and more important exclusions still exist. The Judge, the Sheriff, and King’s Counsel, must still be Protestants. God forbid that I should insinuate that in ordinary cases, either between man and man, or in the prose- cution for ordinary outrages, these exclusions prevent the law from being fairly administered to a Roman Catholic . nn * His words are, ‘‘ I know there is a cant language current << about the difference between exclusion from employment, «even to the most rigorous extent and exclusion from the <« natural benefit arising from a man’s own industry. When a ‘< great portion of the labour of individuals goes to the state, «« and is by the state again returned to the individual through the «¢ medium of offices, and in the circuitousprogress from the pri- « vate to the public, and from the public to the private fund, the «« families from whom the revenue is taken are indemnified, and «¢ an equitable balance between the government and the subject ‘is established ; but ifa great body of the people who contri- O4: as political servitude as well as domestic, which our ancestors have always regarded as a great calamity ; as an occasion of scorn or commisseration for those whose lot it was, according as it befel them through their misfortune or their baseness. It was once cus- tomary in England to taunt the Frenchman with the name of slave, until the fury into which he kindled at his shame set the world on fire. The Spaniard is regarded as a slave, and there is not a generous nature but glows with indignation at his wrongs. The Italian also, and the German, are called slaves, and no undegenerate Englishman contrasts- their condition with his own, without returning thanks that he is not like them; but be their condition as it may, an object of compassion er contempt, an occasion of indignation at the worthlessness of the oppressor, or at the cowardice of the oppressed, I do not hesitate to-say, that for the gratification of all the political desires, and for all the purposes of ambition and public pride, the condition of the Frenchman, the Spaniard, or the German, is infi- nitely better than that in which the Catholics of Treland are; placed. Let aman content himself with his meat, and drink, and sleep—let him as- pire to nothing better than the safe recurrence of bute to this state lottery are excluded from all the prizes, the stopping the circulation with regard to them may be a most cruel hardship, amounting in effect to being doubly and trebly taxed ; and it will be felt as such to the very quick by all the families, high and low, of those hundreds of thousands who are denied their chance in the returned fruit of their own industry.” —From the letter before quoted. 3 Or his daily pleasures, and devote himself exclusively to what gratifies his senses and his selfishness, un- mindful of his country and his dignity, and not heeding that nature gave him an erect front,. and bad him to look up: let him subdue himself to this ; and he shall live as commodiously in Madrid or Berlin, and perhaps more so, than in London or in Dublin. ‘To such a man it is as indifferent as to a horse where he lives or dies, provided his pas- ture be good. In this respect the Spaniard is on, at least,’as good a footing as the Catholic; . for all the more generous objects of mankind, for all those by which he is distinguished from the lower ranks of the creation, for celebrity, for honour, com- mand, respect, he is infinitely his superior. And let it not be thought that the desire of these things is artificial ; let it not be thought a superfluous appetite which gorged and pampered man has un- naturally excited to relieve him from satiety. » It is as real as the love of rest or food. Nature has given to all animals appetites calculated for their preservation in the condition she intended for them: but the natural state of man is to live in great communities with his fellow creatures. He has been accordingly endowed with appetites and inclinations that are necessary for the formation and preservation of human fellowship; appetites that are as true to nature, as genuine, and as crav- ing, as those which are employed for his individual support. ‘The ‘desire of friendship, of respect, of honour, of celebrity, of attaining those conditions that invest us with awe and veneration, and secure ‘ ref te ” s Pe ay ls Nd een oer Ge aie ges, * ee = aie a 2 at ase ~ — ———, = eae ' ~ ZA yapmaciiy ia ae atl it . Te ow j ‘ Le. z ~ _ = G , a ———— Si Re eg ee — — - — “ = SS i Rees eee = ~ 56 our memory when we are no more, are as.real and as necessary to the preservation of that condition for which nature framed us, as the more ignoble pas- sions which minister exclusively to the safety and gratification of the individual. I would not de- fraud of their just praise the virtues which aim at the good will and happiness of those with whom we converse in private life; but they have always been postponed in the estimation of mankind to those stronger passions which urge us to seek the appro- bation, and labour for the good of great bodies of the human race. ‘The virtues and attachments of private life are necessary to form the domestic groupes which are the materials of society ; but these groupes would have no adhesion with each other were it not for the wider sympathies which encircle the entire mass, and bind us all into one paramount fraternity. ‘These broader passions are not so generally felt, because it is not necessary for the well bemg of society that they should; but wherever they do exist, they are not less powerful or less importunate ; nay, they are more powerful they never clash in noble natures with the others without subduing them. ‘They may not always confer happiness when gratified, but which of our inclinations will? From these loftier propensities the Catholic is no more exempt than other men ; but from all those things to which they urge he is excluded. ‘I’o watch for the public safety in the se- nate, to distribute justice, to'punish the guilty, to protect the mnocent, to enforce the law against of- fenders on behalf of the community, to represent 57 his country in foreign nations, im a word, every kind of dignity and grandeur is denied to him. —It is true, that at present he is qualified by law for the highest military honours, but this is only by an act of the last year; he is still precluded from all those chances of attaining them which are enjoyed by those persons whose kindred or friends can have admission to the civil distinction of the state; he is destitute of all those aids in the steep ascent which can so easily be given by those who have reached, or are climbing into eminence by other paths. What then is left to him? All the sordid departments of the state. I donot mean to speak disrespectfully of any occu- pation, but sordid the departments are where mere gold is to be won in comparison with those where command and dignity remunerate success. The Catholic may make money in the counting-house ; he may cultivate the land, and he may go through the drudgery of the law; but it is the drudgery of the law alone that he can have. There is no pro- fession that requires a greater combination of ex- cellent moral and intellectual qualities, more unre- mitting self-denial, more perseverance, rapidity, and clearness of comprehension, and more general de- a corum in behaviour, than the law; and (were it _ not for the honours to which it occasionally con- ducts) there is no walk in life where these qualities might not be more profitably employed : were it not for the chances of the distinctions which it oe- casionally confers, no man who could earn honora- ble bread in any other way would knowingly sub- 58 mit himself to the labour and difficulties which the bar imposes: but the chances of these distinctions compensate for every thing ; there is no member of that profession so constitutionally diffident of his destinies, so humble in his estimate of himself, but occasionally cheers his spirit,.and confirms his cou- rage, by the contemplation of what it is possible Fortune may do for him. It is our nature to cal- culate the magnitude of the prize rather than our chance of winning it: some degree of hope always mixes with our. wishes ; and those broken aspira- tions to be the foremost in the course, which escape us in the very wreck of expectation, when we can scarcely pray not to be the last, demonstrate how late and how ) or that he has af Bite himself to act with those who entertain such a belief, the result must be the same : (I dc do not say it as a matter of reproach, but as a necessary consequence of their relation to their opponents, ) the result will be a ‘strong aver- sion to every thing that is Catholic. But a lerever a great. part of the cabinet is anti-catholic, a great many of the high and inferior offices of the state must be so too; for it would be-criminal of a mi- nister voluntarily to give power to those who differ from him on such an important subject of public policy. The result must be, that, generally speak. ing, any friendly intercourse between those _per- sons who have obtained official situations through influence with the anti-catholic portion of the ad- 60 ministration and the Roman Catholics, will be al- most impossible. As to the other officers of the state, who are indebted for their promotion to that part of the executive which is friendly to the Ca- tholis, the most that can be expected of them is neu- trality; they must associate on friendly terms with their colleagues in power, and they can scarcely do so and maintain much friendly communion with people of whom their colleagues entertain, or affect to entertain, so much suspicion ; the con- sequence of which is, that the Catholic is shut out from all kindly interchange of hospitality with the persons who are in power, and from the circle in which they move. But this circle comprehends all that has any pretence to rank. in the capital of Ireland ; the few noblemen who reside in Dublin, the officers of the viceroy, the dignitaries of the church and of the law, a few wealthy merchants and landed proprietors, the commanders of the garrison and their families, are barely sufficient to form what may be called one good set. A further consequence of which is, that the Catholic, expell- ed from the circle to which he might belong by his fortune and accomplishments, must form a dis- tinct society for himself; and thus there exists in Dublin two societies, one Protestant and one Ca- tholic, as distinct from each other as if the first was in Pekin and the other in Madrid: the indi- viduals of the one know those of the other very little: for domestic intercourse and the interchange of those civilities which humanize mankind they are almost totally unacquainted. Whatever mu- 61 tual intercourse subsists between them arises from their meeting in the pursuit of their daily avocations, and there it ends. Some indivi- duals may be free of both these communities, but it is a freedom enjoyed by exceedingly few Catho- lics ;, itis a freedom difficultly, very difficultly ob- tained by them; it must be by some manifest su- periority of rank and fortune over the bulk of those by whom they are admitted, and even then they must consider it an honour to be received by per- sons, to whom their presence would be an honour if they were of any religion but the Catholic. With- out this superiority of rank a Catholic has scarcely a chance of access to that class of Protestants, which is composed of his political opponents, of their col- leagues in office, and of the respectable Protestants whom they inevitably draw into one society with themselves ; unless perchance he entitle himself to their condescension by a constant profession of in- difference to his political condition, by joming m decrying those whose only fault is their excessive zeal in his behalf, by cringing upon men who hate and despise his sect, and by swallowmg bum- pers to toasts which a man of spirit would resent as an insult. As for those Catholics who take an active part in the public proceedings of their body, they are shunned as if they were in- fected with the plague. If their vanity were all that suffered by the exclusion, their loss would scarcely deserve notice: the Catholic who could descend to the consideration of such paltry in- terests when his liberties are at stake, merits to be pt ee —s 62 mortified. But much graver interests than those of vanity are wounded; heis precluded from for- tifying, by the honourable assiduities of private life, whatever interest he possesses, and is depriv- ed of all the legitimate advantages which spring from social communion with the wealthy and the powerful. Many of these advantages are perhaps too minute to bear a several examination ; but taken together they form a mass that adds not a little to the weight of the positive enactments that afflict him. This is the condition of the Roman Catholics: whether you choose to call it a condition of sla- very or of liberty, sure I 4m it is a state of great humiliation and privation: it is such a condition, that rather than submit to it, there is not an Eng- lishman for whose degeneracy his ancestors would not blush, but would gladly lose his life: but it is time to examine how the interests of the nation at large are affected by it. If the statement of the consequences that seem to me likely to result from continuing the Catho- lies in the condition they are now placed appear alarming, let it not be mistaken for a threat ; every man who has the least claim to candour will ac- knowledge that there is nothing of the spirit of a menace in a fair exposition of necessary conse- quences, however likely to rouse our fears those consequences may be; he will in such an exposition recognise the office of a friend, exercising a well intended foresight on our behalf, and warning us 68 of an evil which he is sincerely anxious to avert ; an office not only compatible with, but necessarily implying a kindly feeling towards the persons whom it is designed to place upon their guard. A menace is the denunciation of an evil to be in- flicted by ourselves, of our free will; it is made for selfish purposes, implies hostile dispositions, and consequently disentitles him who uses it to the favour of those to whom it is addressed. ‘This feeling I totally disclaim. Ido not speak of the evil to which I allude of a thing to be done by me, or perhaps by any Catholic now living, but as something which must sooner or later result from the continuance of the present system, be the dis- positions of the generation which now suffers under it what they may. We must remember, that the arguments which are now urged against the Catholi¢s are not founded upon temporary circumstances, made use of with a view to the postponement of their eman- cipation to a more favourable time, for example, until the expiration of ten or twenty years. If their relief were only delayed for such a period it is not likely that any particular consequence would result ; hope would still sustam the Catholics, and they could go on petitioning for the twenty years to come, as they have done for the twenty just passed ; but the arguments now used against them are of a nature which, if valid, must exclude them from what they seek for ever. Zt 2s of the conse- 64 quences of perpetual exclusion that I proceed io treat. Have the men who advise the perpetuation of the present system ever pondered upon the conse- quences that must: result from the adoption of their counsel ?' Do they regard the Catholics ‘as stocks or stones? Is it possible they can think, that if the Catholics lose all hope of being re- dressed by parliament, they would not redress them- selves if they had power? Surely the men who think that, under every circumstance to soothe, in spite of every motive to demean himself as a good citizen, in. spite of interest, in spite of affection, in spite of all the motives that maintain the social league, the Catholic would meditate the destruc- tion of the state, surely these men cannot expect that he shall be its friend, when he is divested of the privileges of a citizen, when he is rejected from the state, when he is stigmatized as its enemy. All this may be necessary in the opinion of some, but in the opinion of no reasonable man can it be other than the occasion of the most inevitable ani- mosities; it is enough that they consider the Ca- tholic so dissimilar from other men as to be insen- sible of kindness; they cannot imagine him to’ be so totally unlike the species of which he wears the form, as to be also insensible to injury ; if he can- not love when others. love, he cannot love when others hate; it would be monstrous to expect Zt; it would be the grossest hypocrisy in a. Catholic to pretend it. It is idle to disguise it, if the Ca- is 65 tholics ever cease to hope for reliéf from the legis. lature of their country (which they as yet have never done,) they will seek it wherever they are likely to find it. They will avail themselves of the first opportunity, if opportunity should ever come, of taking without asking what they asked’ and were refused. It is contrary tonature that when the Ca- tholic once despairs he should continue an attached citizen. ‘*‘ But who ‘cares whether-he is attached or Se “* not ?”? cries the advocate of violence; ‘* his neck ‘“is under our foot, and he stirs but to be érush’ ‘““ed.?? This is very valliant to’be sure!) but is it wisdom ? is it probity ? is it the mode in which mankind is to be governed? is it the treatment due to our fellow creature, to our fellow citizen, to our brother christian ? to a man whose crime it is that he wishes to embrace his countrymen in friendship, and be allowed to prove that he is not undeserving of their regard? Is there nothing to be deprecated in provoking gloomy and deep resent- ments because you can set those’ resentments at _ defiance ? But can you set them at defiance ? ' Yes, for the present you can; but are the circumstances immutable which now enable you to do so ? Is your prosperity as everlasting as your hatred?’ Is that supremacy over the ocean and the land, is that tran- quillity at home, are those splendid alliances abroad, that have raised youabove the vulgar policy of con- ciliating your fellow citizens, to endure for ever without the possibility of change? Is war for ever banished from the world? Are those valiant legions who won a triumph in’ every battle as im- F 66 mortal as their renown? Where is the nation over whose head twenty years have rolled without be- ing obliged to struggle with the collected might of all her citizens for her very life? “The history of every country is the record of a perpetual strife to maintain existence: like the beings who compose it, the structure of a nation is wonderful and fear- ful: it is obnoxious to a thousand modes of vio- lence} from without; a thousand causes of decay within: it is folly to close our eyes against the truth ; depend upon it the time must come, and at no distant period, when the strength, though un- combined and scattered-of four millions of people im this empire, will be a great instrument of good or of evil. How many rebellions have ravaged Eng- land, Ireland, and Scotland within one century ? within the memory of the living how often has the legislature proclaimed the existence of deep and broad conspiracies against the state? How often has the act of Habeas Corpus been in consequence suspended ? Suppose one of the conspiracies. was so far successful as to make it doubtful who should be the traitors, those who assailed or those who . defended the existing institutions: suppose that at such a fearful moment the Catholics should be plunged into irremediable despair by the predomi- nance of their adversaries’ counsel. Suppose that the leaders of the body which was arrayed against the constitution. as it now is, by whatever name they are to be called, offered religious liberty to all sects ; would the Catholic be as much an ob- ject of contempt then as he is now? Would an a 67 hasty act, passed when it could no longer be with- held, appease the accumulated resentments of per- haps half'a century of suffering? “ Let us be- ware,”’ says the prophetic Bacon, ‘‘ how we suf- fer the matter of troubles to be prepared, for no man can forbid the sparks that may set all on fire.”? Are men at a loss to imagine whence the spark may come that shall set fire to the coun- try? Isthere no latent fire in Europe which it may hereafter blaze and kindle it? Are Prussia, Spain or Italy satisfied with their lot? Is there a tian who thinks that the world will continue as it -S for half a century to come ? Are revolutions at an end, or have men ceased to be susceptible of the emotions with which the spectacle of great changes was wont to agitate them heretofore? Is there no- thing appalling in the dilating grandeur of America spreading her giant form from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and making it doubtful, by the unprece. dented prosperity she enjoys, whether her enmity is doomed to be more formidable to these countries than her example? But these are mere contin- gencies! These events, that may raise our oppres- sed citizens to the respectability of being able to do an injury, may never happen, and if they do not until such a lapse of time, that it would be foolish to trouble ourselves about them. To be sure they may never happen, and if at all, proba- bly not for a long time. \ But are they impossible or improbable ? Are they so visionary that a wise man will disdam to guard himself against them ? Are they at any rate so remote as the evils that F2 68 are apprehended from emancipating the Catholics, and which are urged to caution us against that measure ? Is it apprehended that the attack which the emancipated Roman Catholics are to make on the established church shall be immediate ? Is that accumulation of Catholic force, which is so dreaded, to take place all at once ? Is it to be caus- ed at. once by the act of their emancipation? It is not pretended—it is not pretended that the evils anticipated by their opponents from their emanci- pation will occur in this generation, but in a fu- ture; and even then not certainly, but possibly. But if the Catholics were never to be emancipat- ed, that they would avail themselves of any occa- sion that would enable them to liberate themselves, that such occasion, would from some quarter or another at last present itself, whether from the bo- som.of England, or from Europe or America, be- fore half a century, is not merely probable or pos- sible, but certain and inevitable. ‘The more [I live the more I learn to be surprized at nothing ; but I confess it amazes me that men should be so keen sighted into the most remote futurity to de- scry something that may justify division and dis- franchisement, and not be able to see a single one of the thousand things so much nearer and so much larger that recommend conciliation and be- nevolence. oo rf 4 q ir if There is one fact from which it might chance to be collected that the pressure of the penal code upon the Roman Catholics would, under no cir- 69 cumstances, be sufficient to urge them to revolt— namely, that hitherto it has not had that effect. But it must be remembered that, from the Revo- lution, up I may say to the year 1793, they had no power whatever. It was not until the com- mencement of this reign that they received any relief from the most deplorable condition to which a people was ever sunk ;* until they drew a little breath it is not wonderful that they should and could do nothing; scattered, weakened, and vigilantly watched as they always were. In 1793, they obtained substantial benefits, benefits which placed that generation of Catholics in a condition for which, at the commencement of their lives, they had not dared to hope. From that day to this they have always been sustained by * Swift describes their condition in these words —* We «look upon the Catholics to be altogether as inconsiderable “as the women and the children ; their lands are entirely ta- “ken from them, and they are rendered incapable of ever pur- « chasing any more ; and for the little that remains, provision “is made by the late act against Popery, that it will daily ‘‘ crumble away : to prevent which some of the most consider- *« able among them have already turned Protestants, and so in «all probability will many more. Then the Popish priests « are all registered, and without permission (which I hope will «‘ not be granted) they can have no successors; so that the «« Protestant clergy will find it perhaps no difficult matter to «‘ bring great numbers over to the church; and in the mean «time the common people, without leaders, without disci- «« pline or natural courage, being little better than the hewers << of wood and drawers of water, are out of all capability to do “any mischief, if they were ever so well inclined.” — Swift's Works, Letter concerning the Sacramental Lest. 70 one expectation or another, and they are at this mo- ment more confident of success than ever they were before. They see all that is great and noble in the land arrayed in their behalf; they see the mer who have borne the weight of the mightiest mo- narchies decline the glorious burden rather than desert their cause. They see toleration and phi- losophy diffusing itself on every side; therefore they have not despaired, and therefore the conse- quence of despair did not take place; but even so, I am quite sure that fewer Catholics would have been concerned in the late rebellion if they had been subject to no religious disabilities; imdeed [ question if that rebellion could have taken place. { am quite certain that the chiefs of that enterprise calculated not a little on the antipathy to the go- vernment and the republican spirit, which the pe- nal code had diffused among the Catholics: nor was their calculation entirely erroneous ; since that period, independent of the well founded hopes the Catholics have been entertained of relief from par- liament, they have been kept down by a great mili- tary establishment, by the terror with which sup- pressed revolt always fills the minds of men, and by the living memory of the burnings and hangings which they witnessed. But the generation that saw these things with their own eyes is passing ra- pidly away, to be succeeded by another who can only learn them from the unimpressive and uncon- sulted testimony of history. But suppose that the penal code were insuffici- 71 ent to excite a civil war, or to render it more for- midable if excited by other causes; suppose that England, exempt from the hazards and vicissi- tudes to which nature has subjected man and all his works, shall always enjoy, without diminu- tion, the strength she now possesses: is civil war the only evil that is to be apprehended from the dissatisfaction of the people towards their govern- ment? Is the tranquillity of Ireland sufficiently secured because rebellion cannot tear down the union flag from the ramparts of the castle, or in- sult the garrisons of our cities? Do you account as nothing the desultory outrages of political ani- mosity which have for years given to a part of Ire- land the appearance of a settlement on the con- fines of an Indian tribe, where no man is secure, when he retires to rest, that he will not be awaked by the whoop and the tomahawk of savages ? Do you account as nothing the blood of peaceful citizens shed upon their own hearths, and the fires that kindle the midnight sky from their burning habita- tions? Do you account as nothing what Mr. Peel calls the conjuration of a people against the law, and against every thing that dares to appeal to it for protection or redress ? But these things ‘‘ have nothing to do with the . Catholics’ ‘* penal code :”’ the perpetrators of these outrages do not care a straw whether Lord Fingal be in parliament or not; these enormities spring from other causes, which might operate when not a vestige of the penal code were left. 72 In contradiction I assert, that the penal code is the immediate cause of a great portion of these outrages, and must continue to be so as long as it exists, and that it contributes to the production of the oer largely, though not immediately : but as this fesexteerr is too important to be decided by mere assertion, it will be proper to enquire fur- ther into the matter. Mr. Peel has fully explained the nature of these disturbances in his official exposée of the condition of Ireland, made on the 23d June 1814, in the House of Commons, when he moved for leave 'to bring in a bill for the better execution of the law in that country. His speech is given at full length in Hansard’s Parliamentary Register, vol. 28, page 163; if you take the trouble to look into that work you will see that the following extracts are made fairly : << These disturbances,’’ he said, ‘‘ origmated in « different causes; the first that he would men- <‘ tion were the result of political combinations ; ‘‘ these combinations,” he said, ‘* were confined “‘to infatuated people, who were the dupes of ‘¢ others.”’? The second class of combinations were, ‘‘ Those which were formed under pretence of re- «¢ dressing what was represented as a local griev- ‘ance.’ ‘The objects of these combinations were “s various, though the mode of carrying them into «¢ effect was in most cases the same, to inflict pun- *‘ ishment upon those who disobeyed their orders ; ee ' —- — rN ere 73 ‘‘ who gave more than the prices they thought “fit to fix upon land, to prevent. new tenants “* from taking land, and for other similar. pur- ** poses.”’ ‘* There was also a third species of disturbance ‘* of the public peace, to which he alluded with un- ‘* feigned regret—he meant that which arose from ‘‘ religious animosity. He would not now enter ‘‘into the history of those unfortunate disputes, ““but he had the satisfaction to state, that not- “ withstanding the pains that had been taken in ‘“< Treland, by means of the press and of in- “* flammatory speeches, to induce the Roman Ca- “< tholics to believe that the Irish Government << was not disposed to administer impartial justice << to them, as well as to their Protestant fellow- ‘* subjects, that these efforts had in a great degree “‘ failed of success.* ‘There existed in Ireland * No man ever said that the government or the judges were guilty of partiality in administering justice between the Ca- tholics and Protestants, but shey did say (and it is obviously true) that juries animated by party spirit would not, and ‘could not be impartial on party questions; that a jury of Orange- men uniformly screen the Orangemen for offences against their adversaries ; and that whenever the sheriff happened to be a Ribbandman, and his pannel Ribbandmen, that the Orangeman had not justice; this is all that was ever pretended upon this point: nor was such an obvious proposition asserted in in- flammatory speeches and a libellous press, as Mr. Peel al- leged; but in grave debates in the House of Commons, by the lights and ornaments of their country, by Mr. Ponsonby and Sir John Newport: the latter went so far as to say, in his 74: “‘ many obstacles to the administration of the law, *¢ and one of the. greatest, was the difficulty of pro- “curing persons to give information to govern- ‘‘ ment, and evidence against the violators of the “* peace.” Such was the inférmation respecting the dis- turbances in Ireland which her minister furnished to the parliament. I think you must perceive that they have their root in the penal code, and must endure whilst it lasts. ~In the first instance, I entreat_your attention to those interruptions of the public tranquillity which arise from religious difference. ‘They constitute Mr. Peel’s third class of disturbances, but I shall examine them before the others, because, they are the more immediate consequence of their common cause, and operate not a little in aggravating the rest. It cannot surely be expected that the ignorant place in the House of Commons, 25th Nov. 1814, (vide Han- sard, vol. 29, page 522,) speaking of the Insurrection Act, that “to his own knowledge the powers given by that act to the magistrate had, in many instances, been perverted to gra- tify personal resentments and private views, merely from a rancorous feeling, arising from a difference of religious belief.” Would the magistrate who was guilty of this offence be a fit man to return or sit upon a jury, to investigate an affray be- tween Orangemen and Catholics? And is a man to be called an incendiary for saying that he would not? And would his being placed there not encrease the general distrust, and ha- tred-of the law that Mr. Peel complains of? 79 people of this country should be wiser than the legis- lature, or that they should love each other, when they are told by the law that they are proper objects for mutual hatred: the law tells the Protestant that the Catholics are irreconcilably his enemies, and that he cannot be trusted with his concerns ; she tells the Catholic that his interest is incompati- ble with the safety of the Protestant establishment. Can we wonder that thus instructed by such autho- rity, the people of the north, consisting in equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics, should split in two hostile factions? Were the penal code-to perform its work in silence, if it produced no com- plaints, no entreaties for relief, no remonstrance, no retorts, this separation of the mixed population of the north of Ireland into two well defined and hostile factions, would be inevitable. Superiority is too pleasing to the weakness of human nature not to be enjoyed, and the most obvious mode of enjoying it isto make it felt by our inferiors; it matters not whether the inequality has been pre- duced by the depression of others, or by our own elevation; the ignorant and narrow-minded will equally exult in the disparity. But the operation of the penal code never can be silent ; it must hence- forth, as long as it exists, be the subject of inces- sant invective and of defence; this is the law of its future being to which those who wish to continue it must make up their minds. Until it be destroyed, radically and totally destroyed, or until the privilege of discussion be utterly suppressed, the passions of the people of Ireland must be kept inflamed by perpetual arguments to prove the rights of Catholic 76 citizens to freedom, and by opposing arguments that they have forfeited their right by their crimes or bad propensities. In a nation where so much is done by popular opinion, the men who think it their duty or their interest to keep the Catholics as they are, will naturally endeavour to gain the pub- lic opinion to their side: they will cultivate its al- liance by the most exaggerated accounts of Catholic enormities, and the grossest misrepresentation of their religious principles: the press will teem with the most exasperating reproaches and justifications; it might, perhaps, suffice for that part of the press which supports the Catholics, to reason, to expostu- late, to soothe, to state in cold and abstract reason- ing the policy and justice of giving equal liberty to all; but metaphysical reasoning will not satisfy an angry and disappointed multitude ; the press must kindle with the kindling passions of the party to which it is devoted ; it will find itself best sup- ported when it becomes the vehicle of all that can gall and exasperate its opponents: this applies to the press, both Catholic and Anti-Catholic, but more especially to the latter, for that part of the press will have recourse to vituperation, not only to divert the tedium .of abstract dissertation, or to enliven the dullness of mere logic, but to supply the total want of both. Invective is its only argu- ment, for its object is to prove that the Roman Ca- tholics are unworthy, by reason of their religion, of sharing the constitution with their brother Protes- tants. Now this can only be done by convicting them of some turpitude or unsocial principle,—ac- cordingly it will teem with the grossest misrepre- i | | | | | | | ay a A i | sentations of Catholic principles and conduct,— their dogmas will be laughed at, their moral princi- ples reviled, and every thing which they hold dear assailed by the obscenest ribaldry. From this state of things there must ensue fre- quent personal altercations and private enmities, which will again mingle with the public contest, and re-animate it when it droops; general hate will lead to private wrongs, and private wrongs again conduct to general animosity; personal friendships and dislikes will draw into the contest many individuals who were indifferent to the origi- nal subject of dispute, and they again will draw their friends into the feud, and thusthe breach will spread in every direction until it divide the entire nation. This would be bad enough, and tend in no slight degree to the religious animosities of which we are investigating thecause, ifthe government were quite neutral in the conflict ;. but the Irish government will not, and cannot remain neutral. As I have be- fore observed, the Catholic question has so far ad- vanced, that if the influential members of a great family, whose opinions have so much weight in the decisions of the legislature, if the ministry, in all its departments, were formed of men who were perfectly indifferent to the defeat or success of the Catholies, they would obviously succeed in a very short time: If the leading members of the government there- fore shall take a part (as they cannot but do, ) against the demands of the Catholics, the effect must be 78 that the religious feud will be again further exaspe- rated in its malignity, enlarged and elevated in its sphere. ‘The pulpit will resound with the coarsest bilingsgate of the porter-house, and every man in every station-who seeks to raise himself by the favour of an Anti-Catholic minister, will find it his interest to strain every faculty he possesses, not only to shew that he himself dislikes or fears the Catholics, but to convince others that they should do the same ; which is:synonymous with saying that- it will be his interest to excite religious hatred. Every man who signs a petition against the Catholics, or at- tends a meeting to frustrate their designs, neces- sarily foment religious hatred; it may not be the object but it is the mevitable consequence of his act. I am. not at present enquiring whether in doing these things he deserves praise or blame, whe- ther it is not reasonable that he should express his opinions as wellas a Catholic. All I contend for is, that in poimt of fact, by so doing, he contri- butes to keep alive the religious dissentions which have caused such misery m this country ; he makes the Catholic dislike him, and he persuades others ‘to distrust the Catholic. Is not this fomenting religious hatred ? And is it not clear that the man who can do this most effectually is (ceteris pa- yibus) the man whom an Anti-Catholic minister will consider most worthy of his favours? No- thing can be more certain than that to an Anti- Catholic minister it ‘will be a strong objection to any man that he supports a great measure which the minister holds to be pernicious. Nothing can be more clear than that to such a minister 79 it will appear, not a small addition to the merit of any man that he is sufficiently enlightened to think on the most important subject of national policy like himself. Has this preference no effect in alienating the Catholi¢s from the government ? Has it no effect in affixing upon the government the odium of every insult that is offered to the Catholic by its adherents, and of every outrage that is committed by the Orangemen of the North? Has the natural preference the minister for the per- sons who think with him, no influence in encreasing the numbers and the respectability of these associa- tions, and consequently in adding to their audacity and expectation of impunity ? And how isit expect- ed that comprising in their numbers almost all who think with the anti-catholic portion of the ministry, or wish to recommend themselves to its patronage, and consequently deeming themselves protected by the executive; how is it expected that they will conduct themselves towards the defenceless and notoriously detested Catholics? Is it matter of wonder, that in their drunken orgies, in their in- sulting commemoration of ancient defeats, in their triumphant display of orange flags, the passions of both parties should be so inflamed as to prevoke, or fo give insult? Is it to be wondered at that these insults should lead to murder and to mas- , sacre? Is it wonderful that in this feyer of men’s blood, the verdict of a jury should only satisfy one part? What is the result ? That the party which conceives itself to have been wronged will consider ’ the verdict as the sentence of faction, not the voice of law; and that they should thenceforward 80 think it necessary to look elsewhere for justice and protection. And where do you think an ex- asperated, ignorant, deluded, people shall look for justice “under these circumstances? Where, but to themselves; where but to revenge, converting the ‘fear of their opponents into their own de- fence? © Thus counter associations will be form- ed which’ will arrogate’ the function of inflicting vengeance for all injuries ;‘ the regular tribunals of the country will thus “fall into disrepute and odium ; and all who furnish it with information, or who'in any wise contribute to its proceedings, will, by a great body of the people, be looked upon as enemies. Hence the frequent murders of ° wit- nesses and of jurors; hence the difficulty in ob- taining information, which Mr. Peel complains of ; hence, “ the confederacy .in guilt, and the warfare ‘against the regular institutions of the country,” which he feels so deeply, though he will not re- move their cause. These, things must exist as long as the penal code is suffered to remain; would they cease if it were destroyed 2? There is every probability they would. Whatever exasperation is produced by the ‘parliamentary debates, touching the Catholics, or the Orangemen, by aggregate meetings, by com- mittees, by*Catholic speeches and resolutions, and newspaper discussions, would cease immediately ; the sympathy which both Catholics and their oppo- nents imagine to exist between the orange lodges and the influential part of the Irish government would cease. The administration could no longer $1 be an\ Anti-catholic administration ;_ its preponde- rating members must have been friendly to the measure or it would not have passed ; and its suc- cess would prove that the prejudices against it in high quarters had subsided. It would cease to be the duty or the interest of any minister to depre- ciate the estimation in which the Catholics should be held, (it is at present both the one and the other,) and consequently the activity and zeal in exciting hostility to that body would cease to be a recommendation ; this would inevitably produce a revolution in the demeanour. of all the persons who look for places ; a class of people very numerous in Ireland, for like vermin they abound in dis- eased and emaciated habits: cut off the govern- ment expectants from the Orange lodges; cut off the underlings of tho8e expeetants who mimic the conduct of their little principal ; cut off the mayors of corporations, and petty officers, and aldermen, and common council men, who seek in some pal- try place a refuge from impending bankruptcy ; do this, and you cut off the efficient strength of the Orange lodges; and you will effectually do it by repealing the penal code. If it were once be- lieved throughout Ireland that the Orangemen and Orange principle swere discountenanced at the Cas- tle; if the nation could be once convinced that an Orangeman would be in as bad repute with go- vernment: as a ribbandman is now, every thing that has the least claim to respectability of condition in the Orange lodges would immediately withdraw. G ong NF TRS Se Their arms would be taken from the miserable remnant of that party, they would perceive them- selves abandoned to the law for their transgres- sions, and they would never dare to repeat the outrage of Kilkeel, the massacre of Corinshiega, or that perfidious assassination which was more recently perpetrated at Aughnacloy. Convinced at length that they were not encouraged by authority, seeing : themselves deserted by the respectable gentry of the | country, and having nothing to protect them but their gcod conduct, they would be more cautious how they gave offence, and they would lose the power of provoking it. If at all continued, those comme, morations, and party tunes, and orange lilies, that are now heard and seen with such poignant indig- nation by the humiliated Catholics, would lose their force ; they would be no longer the symbols of domination and superiority; that superi- ority by supposition would be no more. “ The Battle of the Boyne,’’ and ‘* Croppies lie down,”” and “ Protestant Boys,’? and such like things, would pass into a signification quite differ- ent from that they at present bear: if played at all, they would be associated with feelings of civil liberty, in which Catholic and Protestant would share. They are now a conventional language to express joy at the humiliation of the Catholics, and a determination to continue it. ‘* The Glo- rious Memory,” and such toasts, mean nothing else ;* when the humiliation was no more the signs * It has often surprised me that men-could be so silly as to express wonder at the Roman Catholics being displeased at, 83 which now express it would be useless, or be made to signify something else; they might, by a na- tural association, eeapnee the deanna of the de- thronement of a king—they might be employed with the same meaning as Major Cartwright at- taches to his toasts, when he drinks “ the Barons who extorted Magna Charta from King John,” or ‘* the Revolution which cashiered the Stu- arts.’? But the Orangemen are not remarkable for their attachments to the principles of democracy, and would probably drop these toasts and em- blems together, when they ceased to annoy the Papists, and could only mark their own love of civil liberty. So far for the connexion which exists between the Catholic penal code and those disturbances of the public peace arising from religious distinctions : as to the others, though they leave no outward mark of ernst hatred, yet they are also either caused, or greatly encreased by the same circum- stances ; it is impossible not to see that they spring from disaffection to the British government :—the first class into which Mr. Peel has divided them is, according to himself, political ; the second class he does not consider to have political purposes in view, these toasts and emblems ; ae) are meant as.an insult, they can be meant as nothing else when they are known to be taken as such. Insults are B acika by the intention of him who gives, not by the pain of him w ifs suffers, If a man lays his finger upon my shoulder, with the intent that it should be con- sidered a blow, the insult is as great as if he knocked me down. 84 but merely Ideal regulations, such as the price of wages, rent, tithes, &c. but in truth they are both bottomed upon an assumption of the sovereign power; they both assume legislative functions ; they do not aim at objects personal to the conspira- tors, but-at the establishment of general laws which are to bind the country ; they carry on an open war as far as they have the means, against the go- vernment, and every thing connected with it: they look upon that government as an usurpation, as a dominion of force which it is meritorious to impede, to elude, to subvert: and in pursuit of what they consider an att of patriotism, they put to death without remorse all whom they con- sider enemies or traitors. ‘They have not arms, or intelligence, or leaders, or money, sufficient to draw outa regular army into the field; if they had we should have a campaign in Ireland before Easter. They suit their mode of warfare to their means; they carry ona desperate guerilla war with government, in which they give and expect no quarter. Every strageling soldier whom they catch, every gauger, every tithe-proctor, every active magistrate, who has distinguished himself against them, and whom they rank among their enemies, is put to the sword. This is a dreadful state of things, and the more so because it sucks into its vortex of guilt men who would shudder at the very thought of participating in such enormities, from the ordinary motives which impel to crime. It is the first step which costs, aud when once we stain ourselves with blood for 85 any object, we shall be more likely to spiil it for another. It is notorious that men whomno gold could hire to commit ordinary assassinations, such as take place in France and in England, and every country of the world, have, in the maintenance of their system, for the enforcement of their orders, or for the punishment of their opponents, com- mitted the most horrible barbarities ; men, women, children ; decrepid age, in which the bad _pas- sions might be supposed to have burned out; in- fancy, in which it is impossible they could have kindled, have been known to commit acts without compunction to forward the object of these associations, at which humanity revolts. By what sophistry do they reconcile their conscience to these enormities? Simply this, they regard them as acts of warfare against the government or its supporters, and they hate the government. Mr. Peel tells us that three entire parishes in the most populous district of Ireland, conspired to commit a murder on one Connell, an informer. Can it be believed that all the inhabitants of three parishes had undergone that degree of demoraliza- tion to which the perpetrators of such murders as that of Fualdes must have been reduced? These parishes ‘are chosen by Mr. Peel, not to show their peculiar malignity in crime, but as instances of what was then to be considered the cendition of the south of Ireland: could society endure if all the inhabitants of the south were as depraved as the murderers of Fualdes? impossible—ihree pa- rishes, containing from twenty to thirty thousand i ~ rhe) Ole people of all ages and sexes, would never combine to put a man to death, unless they thought it a praise-worthy act ; our nature is not so bad. But how could they consider such an, abomination an act of merit? they considered themselves in a state of hostility with the government, and Con- nell was an abetter of the government. Now what can be the cause of this hostility to the government? Ido not ask what was the ori- ginal root from which it might spring. But what is the cause that acts continually in perpetuation of this hatred, from which it draws perpetual renova- tion and activity ? it must have some. Like other national discontents that we have heard of, it would starve and perish if not regularly fed and nourished. It is unprecedented that national dis- content could remain so unimpaired, so unmiti- gated through such a lapse of time, if not perpe- tuated by some perpetually operating cause. Look to histery. The Scots hated the English ; they all hated them for their religion, many for the union, and not a few for the substitution on the throne of England of a new family for the old line of Scottish kings. The Scots.several times re- -belled, and for nearly half a century were always ready to rebel. At present they are the most or- derly nation in the world; the nation -to whose institutions the world now turns for lessons in the great’ truths and examples of political wisdom. Two generations passed away, and in their course obliterated the very name of Stuart. “Their me- ST mory continues perhaps a theme of mouraful con- tempiation to ‘the innocuous enthusiast who loves to dwell upon the glories of the bold Bruce and of Wallace Wight. But it has ceased to kindle the living passions that drive the armed rebel to the field. Again, in France: the provinces in the South of France were as hostile to the revolu- tionary government, as it was possible for the peo-— ple of Ireland to be to that of England. For many years they carried on a desultory war against it, not very dissimilar from that which is waged in the disturbed districts against our own. Never- theless tranquillity was restored some years before the fall of Bonaparte, and in one generation more under his sway, the Bourbons would have experi: enced the oblivion to which time has consigned the memory of the Stuarts. It must be confessed that Bonaparte’s was a military government, and the Vendeans were put to death in thousands by fire and sword. But I should be glad to know if the same expedient has not been resorted to in Ireland. I should be glad. to know what. form of death remains to be tried in Ireland by which na- ture canbe overcome. ‘The lash, the gibbet, the bay- onet, thedamp of solitary dungeons,the pestilence of jails crammed to suffocation, thesilent horrorof secret execution, the ignominy of the public scaffold, have been all at one time or other resorted to in Treland, and humanity shudders to relate, have been resorted to in vain. Phe law has been disencumbered of every form that could impede it; it has been stripped of every thing but the sword. Insurrection acts ; 88 acts for summary trials, for confinement after sun- set; every thing that could be done short of de- cimation, to inspire terror into the timid, or to dis- concert the machinations of the guilty, have been put into requisition by the legislature; but all in vain. Crime has triumphed over the law; the law, for the strength of which nothing should be to powerful, too humble for its protection, or too wily for its vigilance, has been eluded, trampled upon and despised. Its intelligence has been cut off—its giant might has been exhausted in ineffec- tual efforts to apprehend the guilty, and it now gropes for its victims through the island, like what the poets feign of the ancient Cyclop, furious, blind and baffled. There is some cause for this peculiar vivacious- ness of Irish discontent; all men of reason must admit it. The penal code is jfadequate to this ef- fect, and no other cause can be assigned which is. Iam aware that many persons attribute this condition of the police of Ireland to the absence of her landed proprietors, which I cannot but con- sider quite inadequate to the effect. It is possible that the presence of a kindly and active gentry might check the consequences which result from the hostility of the people to the government, but their absence could not cause this hostility, it must have some other source. As to the poverty of out people, the same remark applies ; and even if the poverty of the country had a share in produc- oa ae a 89 ing these discontents, the poverty itself is conti- nued in some measure by the penal code, and so likewise is the absence of our landholders. But be this as it may, it is beyond the reach, and can- not be cured by the act of Parliament; but the penal code, and all its consequences, are within its grasp. I am not ignorant that some shallow politicians think that the operation of the Catholic penal code, being confined to persons in the better stations of life, can have no effect in producing discontent ‘among the lower classes—I answer, that é¢ produces an order of things which inevitably causes discontent. They know very little of human nature if they suppose that we concern themselves in nothing which does not affect our own immediate in- terests: whatever these men may deem there are such principles in nature as public spi- rit, as national pride, as sensibility to disrespect, as indignation at oppression, though it is only direct- ed at a class to which we belong, and does not touch us individually: at least so think the best writers on legislation ; at least so thinks Mr. Ben- tham—his opinion is, ‘‘ that the injury done to ““ one individual in such a case becomes an inju- ‘ry to all—from which feeling there springs a ** crowd of evils—antipaihy agaist the particalar “‘ Jaw that shocks the prejudice ; antipathy against «the body of the laws, of which the obnoxious ‘ 93 the known properties of human nature, they will do things injurious to the public weal, the law is re- sponsible for those things : whether the men whom it drives into the commission of these acts are to be considered culpable in a moral point of view, is a question that has nothing to do with the wisdom or folly of the law: the only question for the legisla- ture is this—is, their conduct the natural conse- quence of the law? If it be, place the censure where you will, the calamity itself must fall upon the nation. I have now gone through the greatest part of the task which I had undertaken; I have exa- mined the evils to be expected from emancipating the Catholics, and from leaving them in their pre- sent state. It has been shewn that the only evil that can rationally be feared from that emancipa- tion is, that they would employ the power con- ferred by that measure to subvert the established church, and obtain a national endowment for their own. We have seen that no reason for charging them with any inclination to acquire an en- dowment for themselves, or to molest that of others, is to be found, in the general spirit of Christianity, | in the Catholic religion, in history, in the fair re- sults of self examination, in the demeanour of the Catholics themselves. We have examined how far the power to gratify this inclination, if they felt it, would be encreased by their emancipation. We have seen it would not encrease their num- bers, their spirit or cohesion; that their wealth O4 must continue encreasing without emancipation, and that every check to its accumulation was a national calamity. As to the political power they would acquire, we have seen that it would be still inadequate to enable them to carry their supposed object by coercion, and that nothing could be more foolish than to feel any apprehensions for what they may carry by persuasion, inasmuch as poste- rity willbe better able to decide for themselves than we are. As to the evils of leaving the Ca- tholics in their present state, we have found them to be not remote or contingent, but immediate and inevitable. We have found them to be, (to speak the words of Mr. Bentham) “ antipathy *‘ aoainst the law, antipathy against the govern- “‘ ment, a disposition to resist it, rebellion and civil war ;°’—or if the language of Mr. Peel is to be preferred, “* perpetual disturbances without pre- ‘< cise and definite objects, a general confederacy ‘in crime, a comprehensive conspiracy in guilt, a “« systematic opposition to all laws and municipal ** institutions.” These effects of the Catholic penal code are of that palpable and glaring character which force themselves on the notice of: the most unthinking ; but it also produces other results which carry on their work of devastation in silence and in secrecy, like a pestilence which follows at the heels of war to consummate the havoc of the sword; results of which the havoc is not directed against our fields, our homes, our limbs, but against the noblest qua- = ie oe tee en s —— coe — . = a = a Os © lities of the human soul ; against public generosity, devotion for the public service, disinterestedness, in fine, against every grandor useful quality which holds a place in the catalogue of the civic virtues. Should any man enquire for the traces of these effects, let him seek in Ireland for that universal indignation at individual oppression, that sympatle- tic spirit which binds together the whole nation in a common cause with the meanest individual when a general principle is violated in his person, that enlightened vigilance over the conduct of their rulers, and that devotion to the public service which have rendered England what she is, and which at all times secure for herthat splendid mass of inte- grity and talent, which radiating its light and heat above, beneath; and all around, spreads wider and wider every day the sphere of her happiness and re- nown. I do not say that generous public sentiments are unknown in Ireland, but in comparison with the spirit of England, they more resemble the cold light of a reflected flame than the kindling energy of a native fire. Whatever we have of oes seems borrowed from the example, exhortation, and intermixture with our neighbours ; ; look for instance to the institutions for the diffusion of knowledge and useful habits in both countries ; in one they immediately strike their roots into the soil and flourish, Side in the other, like exotics in an uncongenial climate, they pine away, or if they grow at all, only yield a sickly and scanty fruit. Let any man compare the various philan- thropic associations, such as Lancasterian schools 96 and Savings’ Banks in both countries, and he will see with what a different spirit they are conducted. There is wanting in this country the disposition, both to aid and to be aided, by this sort of things : proceeding from the upper classes of society, often from the immediate members of the executive, they are regarded by our people as the creatures of the government, which they cannot be persuaded has their interest at heart; they thus share the preju- dices which are entertained against the govern- ment; hence the difficulty of persuading them that public schools are designed for their benefit, and have no sinister object, such as proselytism, in view ; hence the difficulty of making the respec- table classes of the different parties into which Ire- land is divided, unite for their establishment on any, even the most unexceptionable principles ; hence the repeated efforts which the persons who patronize them are obliged to make to convince the public that they have no other views than those which they profess. The comparative progress of the Savings’ Banks in both countries equally illus- trates the different spirit of the two countries. Nor is the disposition to give assistance less affected than the disposition to receive it : the want of con- fidence among the lower orders in the proferred beneficence of the wealthy, is insensibly confound- ed with ingratitude ; the lukewarm do not fail to convert it into an excuse to their conscience for want of zeal: the habit of regarding the bulk of a country as proper to be sacrificed to their interest and security, imperceptibly but necessarily con- 9% tracts the sphere of their benevolence: the conse- quence of teaching them that the interests of the few to which they belong are to be preferred to the good of the many ;—carried one gradation fur- ther, is to teach them to prefer their own interest to every other. ‘The lessons of selfishness are not wanting to human nature; we are sufficiently prone to limit our affections to those objects which even the brutes identify with themselves without being disciplined into selfishness by the law ; but this is the lesson of the law as it now stands : hence the notorious venality of the upper classes of the Irish, and hence it is that not a few in every class mock at the very idea of public spirit. I do in my heart believe that there is not as much love of li- berty among the influential classes of this country as would be sufficient to maintain a free govern- ment for one year without the aid of our English neighbours. * But let memake a supposition: suppose that Iam wrong in thinking that injury begets resentment ; wrong in thinking unappeased resentments may break out into rebellions; in thinking that Eng- land is exposed like other nations to vicissitudes which may render rebellions formidable ; in think- H i * TI only speak of the general tendency of the penal code ; of course there are men in Ireland who have escaped its there are noblemen and gentlemen in this country influence ; d have been an ornament to any country in the who woul world. 9$ ing a fixed hostility between the people and the government may be injurious to the public quiet, though it should not break out into regular rebel- lion ; in thinking that this hostility has a bad ef- fect upon the tone of the public mind politically considered ;—in a word, let me suppose that the Catholics were to become, to a man, contented with their state, and destitute of all desire for the valuable privileges which are enjoyed by other ci- tizens; this is surely the condition of that body most to be desired, though impossible to be ex- pected by the advocates of the perpetuity of the penal code. I ask it of every honest man, is that condition not a great evil in itself? must it not be considered so by every one who is worthy of the freedom he enjoys? is it nothing to deprive a class of citizens which comprehends a full fifth of the the population of this great empire, and which 1s more numerous than the entire population of many kingdoms which have played no inglorious part on the theatre of modern Europe; is it no evil to deprive this great section of the empire of privi- leges in defence of which our fathers were proud to shed their blood? Is liberty but a name, a mere theme of declamation among fools and cheats ? Is it a mere imaginary good of which the value depends upon the capricious, estimation of the man to whom it is imparted, or from whom it is withheld ? No; it is a thing of intrinsic worth : it is not a mere theme for declamation amidst fools and knaves; but an inexhaustible souree of noble thoughts and manly actions which cannot other- 99 wise be supplied. Security from <“ foreign levy ‘“‘ and domestic broil’? is a small part of the office of good government ; the formation of the human character, the developement of the great qualities of which nature has only. given us the germs, are among its ends, not less than tranquil- lity at home and security from abroad. It is on their adaptation to this end that free govern- ments found their claim to superiority : by mak- ing the high functions of the state the reward of estimation among the men with whom we live, they inspire us with great motives for atchiey- ing the good and the great things by. which esti- mation must be won. ‘They add force to public opinion, both as a stimulant and a check : they increase the value of private character, and thus foster all the virtues of which it is composed: they spread the sovereignty through the body of the nation, and thus diffuse into the public mind not a little of the sustaining dignity and pride which appertain to sovereignty. ‘They impart fear- lessness to the weak, and moderation to the strong, and to all they communicate that self respect, thet perpetual observance of decorum and decent gra- vity of demeanour to which the Roman charac- ter of old was indebted for its port and. stature, and which at, this day distinguish the “ proud Englishman’’ from all the obsequious and cringing vassals of the rest of Europe. [t may happendéeet- from the nature of man, and the necessities of his condition, that a few individuals only of a nation shall be directly susceptible of the higher influence 100 of freedom ; butthe example and exhortation of these few pervade and leaven the entire mass of the com- munity. Is it then no evil to shut out from this elevating influence four millions of a kingdom whose population is not six? Will the morals of the upper classes of the people, so excluded, suffer nothing? Will they impart nothing of their cha- racter to the corresponding ranks of their more fa- voured countrymen, and will nothing gravitate from the ,higher to the lower orders? To what pursuit will you direct the energies of the aftlu- ent, against whom, by the supposition, the range of public life is to be closed? To what can they betake themselves but to pleasure, to vanity, to the gratification of sensual appetite? Will the inheritors of wealth submit to solitude, to study, to self-denial, to days of abstinence and nights of vigil, without a motive to impel, a hope .to sustain or cheer them 2? Among a people where genius has no honour, where eloquence has no field, where public spirit would be a crime, what could you ex- pect from the nobles and the wealthy ? Would the English universities be thronged with the high- born and affluent but for the functions to which they are called by the constitution of the country, and the general value which it has stamped upon intellectual acquirements? Withdraw ‘these’ re- wards from the exertions of the English and they will subside into the state of apathy, sensuality, and’ « ignorance, in which so large a portion of the rest of Europe is now sunk. ‘The least noxious conse- quence that it is possible to expect from the Catho- 101 lic penal code, is, that the spirit of the Catholic nobility and as should quietly subside into this state,—that they should surrender themselves with- out reserve to then vii fying effects of wealth uncor- rected by the ambition which it inspires, and by the high labours for which it encourages and ena- bles us to prepare. Nature has made perpetual occupation, of one kind or another, requisite to the moral worth of man. When the restraint which the necessity of earning bread imposes on the passions is removed, we must provide another. The participation in the cares’ and duties of a free government furnishes this restraint ; it is effectual ; 10 other is. Therefore we find that England has not degenerated in morals,* though she has so much advanced in wealth; and that the subjects of a despotic government are e always immoral un- less they are poor. I should now conclude, but I cannot refrain from making an observation upon a most extraordinary argument with which Mr. Peel winds up _ his reasoning on the other ‘side of the question. He conjures the House of Commons, if they entertain a doubt upon this subject, to give the benefit of that doubt to the existing order of things, and to weigh ‘‘ the substantial blessings’? which it has conferred upon the country, against the precarious advantages that are promised from a change. On * The contrary has-sometimes been said, but my position is, I think, true. 102 the contrary, I should have thought, that if a doubt existed it should operate on the side of mercy. If a jury were impannelled to enquire whether the principles which were held by any single individual were such as rendered him unworthy of the privi- leges of other citizens, the learned judge would tell them, it was the benignant spirit of our laws, that the accused should have the advantages of every doubt which existed of his guilt. I do not see why the same wise and benevolent maxim should not prevail when the destinies of great multitudes are at issue, as well as when we are deciding upon the fate of a single man. Nor do I understand why the legislatfé~ should de- part in the enactment of a law from the rule which it prescribes to him who is to execute it. Neither do I perceive why, in investigating the wisdom or justice of an old law, they are to be swayed by any other principles than those by which they should be guided if they were establishing a new one. It seems to me that there is something peculiarly to be lamented in the moral condition of the man to whom every thing, however ancient, that deals in punishment, every thing which afflicts great bodies of his species, which represses human genius, and dissociates mankind, does not present itself as an evil which is only to be endured upon the most manifest proof of its necessity ; it may be permitted to old age, so often disappoimted in search of amelioration, constitutionally timorous, and al- 103 most ‘confounding with the works of nature the institutions which it has been familiar with from childhood, to lean towards every thing that can plead time for its continuance, and to presume that whatever is, (however harsh) is for the best ; but the bent of well-constituted youth is quite the other way; for confidence in human virtue and pity and benevolence are its attributes, its orna- ments and flower, and seem to have been given to it by superior wisdom, that the errors of inexpe- rience might always be in favor of humanity. But what could Mr. Peel mean by talking of the sub- stantial blessings of the country? Dees he mean ‘¢ the substantial blessings” of England or of Ire- land? Does he mean that the miseries of this country are to be held of no account in the deci- sion of this question, because of the ‘‘ substantial blessings’ which Hngland has enjoyed? Does he mean that the prosperity of England is the only end of imperial legislatéey sand that being once attained, that it ‘would be rash and presumptuous to expose it to a possibility of hazard by aiming at the prosperity of Ireland ? Does he mean that the happiness of England should console the Irish for their misery? I should have thought that such a mode of reasoning was incompatible with the spirit of the contract that binds together the two nations. I should have thought that when they were united, they were united ‘ for better and for worse, for prosperity and adversity,” for a participation of the good and evil in their present and future fortunes. I should have con- 104 AE eR Te an si ee sidered it a gross violation of their contract that one should be made to suffer the most intolerable evils to protect the over-abundant happiness of the other from the least and remotest hazard. If un- instructed by Mr. Peel, I never should have thought that it would be honest or manly in the English parliament, to which, as to the stronger vessel, the happiness of Ireland has been en- trusted, to say to her when she complains of her condition, ‘‘ the evils that you endure do not af- fect me; Zam happy, and J do not wish for change; however, what you propose is necessary for your well being, it will be of no benefit to me. As it can do me no good, and may, by possibility, do me hurt, I oppose it, be the consequences as. they may to you. I value too much the “ sub- stantial blessings’? which I enjoy, to expose them to any risk by endeavouring to communicate them to you. Iam determined to abide by “the go- vernment which is, for the government that you propose would not add to my prosperity.’’ If the most unprincipled selfishness be wisdom, this argu- ment is profoundly wise ; but sure I am, it shocks every vulgar notion. of generosity, of decency, of honesty. But perhaps I have misunderstood Mr. Peel; perhaps he did not mean that the ‘‘ substantial bless- ings” enjoyed by England should prevent any change for the benefit of Ireland. Perhaps when he spoke of ‘the ‘substantial blessings’? which should induce us ‘to leave Ireland im her present state, he really 105 meant to say that her condition was very good— * good’ is relative, and the treatment which is in- different for a human being, may be excellent for a beast. In this sense the condition of Ireland may be very good: considered as mere dogs, as creatures to be turned to sport or profit, the treat- ment of the Irish may be esteemed a “ substan- tial blessing ;”? but if they be regarded as human beings endowed with rational souls, with the same origin and destination as other men; with the same ‘‘ feelings, passions and appetites’ as the rest of the human race, with virtues to develope, and intellect to cultivate, no nation of the world has been or is in a more miserable condition. There is not at this moment on the face of Eu- rope, not excepting Spain, Italy, or the wildest tracts of Russia, a race of people worse clothed, worse housed, worse fed than the Irish peasantry ; not a race of people who are subject to more con- tumely from the upper orders of society, or thrown into a relation to the government which is more destructive to the human character. ‘This is so notorious in point of fact, however we may differ about the cause, that a foreign writer speaking of our history has said, that ‘* neither the wars of the Barbarians, the descent of the Normans, or the persecutions of the Deoclesian, present any thing similar or second.”’ But Mr. Peel says it is a “ sub- ‘* stantial blessing,”’ and makes it an argument for not adventuring upon a change. I am your very sincere friend, &c, Dublin, Feb. 23, 1819. FINIS. ag. tee en nts i ‘ ane nis ai => jean Nee _ =< Te