If the Catholics are priest-ridden, pamper the rider, and he will not stick so close; dont torment the animal ridden, and his violence will be less dangerous.

The strongest evidence against the Catholics is that of Colonel John Irvine; he puts every thing against them in the strongest light, and Colonel John (with great actual, though I am sure with no intentional exaggeration) does not pretend to say there would be more than forty-six members returned for Ireland who were Catholics; but how many members are there in the House now returned by Catholics, and compelled, from the fear of losing their seats, to vote in favor of every measure which concerns the Catholic church? The Catholic party, as the Colonel justly observes, was formed when you admitted them to the elective franchise. The Catholic party are increasing so much in boldness, that they will soon require of the members they return to oppose generally any government hostile to Catholic emancipation, and they will turn out those who do not comply with this rule. If this be done, the phalanx so much dreaded from emancipation, is found at once without emancipation. This consequence of resistance to the Catholic claims is well worth the attention of those who make use of the cry of No Popery as a mere political engine.

We are taunted with our prophetical spirit, because it is said by the advocates of the Catholic question, that the thing must come to pass that it is inevitable: our prophecy, however, is founded on experience and common sense, and is nothing more than the application of the past to the future. In a few years' time, when the madness and wretchedness of war are forgotten, when the greater part of those who have lost in war, legs and arms, health and sons, have gone to their graves, the same scenes will be acted over again in the world. France, Spain, Russia, and America, will be on us. The Catholics will watch their opportunity, and soon settle the question of Catholic emancipation. To suppose that any nation can go on in the midst of foreign wars, denying common justice to seven millions of men, in the heart of the empire, awakened to their situation, and watching for the critical moment of redress, does, I confess, appear to me to be the height of extravagance. To foretell the consequence of such causes, in my humble apprehension, demands no more of shrewdness, than to point out the probable results of leaving a lighted candle stuck up in an open barrel of gunpowder.

It is very difficult to make the mass of mankind believe that the state of things is ever to be otherwise than they have been accustomed to see it. I have very often heard old persons describe the impossibility of making any one believe that the American colonies could ever be separated from this country. It was always

considered as an idle dream of discontented politicians, good enough to fill up the periods of a speech, but which no practical man, devoid of the spirit of party, considered to be within the limits of possibility. There was a period when the slightest concession would have satisfied the Americans; but all the world was in heroics: one set of gentlemen met at the Lamb, and another at the Lion; blood and treasure men, breathing war, vengeance, and contempt; and in eight years afterwards, an awkward-looking gentleman in plain clothes, walked up to the drawing-room of St. James's, in the midst of the gentlemen of the Lion and Lamb, and was introduced as the Ambassador from the United States of America.

You must forgive me if I draw illustrations from common things, but in seeing swine driven, I have often thought of the Catholic question, and of the different methods of governing man. kind. The object, one day, was to drive some of these animals along a path, to a field where they had not been before. The man could by no means succeed; instead of turning their faces to the north, and proceeding quietly along, they made for the east and west, rushed back to the south, and positively refused to advance : a reinforcement of rustics was called for; maids, children, neighbors, all helped; a general rushing, screaming, and roaring en sued; but the main object was not in the slightest degree advanced: after a long delay, we resolved (though an hour before we should have disdained such a compromise) to have recourse to Catholic emancipation; a little boy was sent before them with a handful of barley; a few grains were scattered in the path, and the bristly herd were speedily and safely conducted to the place of their destination. If, instead of putting Lord Stowell out of breath with driving, compelling the Duke of York to swear, and the Chancellor to strike at them with the mace, Lord Liverpool would condescend, in his graceful manner, to walk before the Catholic doc tors with a basket of barley, what a deal of ink and blood would be saved to mankind!

Because the Catholics are intolerant, we will be intolerant ; but did any body ever hear before that a government is to imitate the vices of its subjects? If the Irish were a rash, violent, and intemperate race, are they to be treated with rashness, violence, and intemperance? If they were addicted to fraud and falsehood, are they to be treated by those who rule them, with fraud and falsehood? Are there to be perpetual races in error and vice between the people and the lords of the people? Is the supreme power always to find virtues among the people; never to teach them by example, or improve them by laws and institutions? Make all sects free, and let them learn the value of the blessing to others, VOL. XXVII. Pam. NO. LIII. D

by their own enjoyment of it; but if not, let them learn it by your vigilance and firm resistance to every thing intolerant. Toleration will then become a habit and a practice, ingrafted on the manners of a people, when they find the law too strong for them, and that there is no use in being intolerant.

It is very true that the Catholics have a double allegiance; but it is equally true that their second or spiritual allegiance has nothin gto do with civil policy, and does not, in the most distant manner, interfere with their allegiance to the crown. What is meant by allegiance to the crown, is, I presume, obedience to acts of parliament, and a resistance to those who are constitutionally proclaimed to be the enemies of the country. I have seen and heard of no instance for this century and a half last past, where the spiritual sovereign has presumed to meddle with the affairs of the temporal sovereign. The Catholics deny him such power by the most solemn oaths which the wit of man can devise. In every war, the army and navy are full of Catholic officers and soldiers; and if their allegiance in temporal matters be unimpeachable and unimpeached, what matters to whom they choose to pay spiritual obedience, and to adopt as their guide in genuflexion and psalmody? Suppose these same Catholics were foolish enough to be governed by a set of Chinese moralists in their diet, this would be a third allegiance; and if they were regulated by Bramins in their dress, this would be a fourth allegiance; and if they received the direc tions of the Patriarch of the Greek Church, in educating their children, here is another allegiance: and as long as they fought, and paid taxes, and kept clear of the quarter sessions and assizes, what matters how many fanciful supremacies and frivolous allegiances they choose to manufacture or accumulate for themselves?

A great deal of time would be spared, if gentlemen, before they ordered their post-chaises for a No-Popery meeting, would read the most elementary defence of these people, and inform themselves even of the rudiments of the question. If the Catholics meditate the resumption of the Catholic property, why do they purchase that which they know (if the fondest object of their political life succeed) must be taken away from them? Why is not an attempt made to purchase a quietus from the rebel who is watching the blessed revolutionary moment for regaining his possessions, and revelling in the unbounded sensuality of mealy and waxy enjoyments? But after all, who are the descendants of the rightful

The same double allegiance exists in every Catholic country in Europe. The spiritual head of the country among French, Spanish, and Austrian Catholics, is the Pope; the political head, the king or emperor.

possessors? The estate belonged to the O'Rourkes, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the time of Cromwell; true, but before that, it belonged to the O'Connors, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the time of Henry VIII. The O'Sullivans have a still earlier plea of suspension, evisceration, and division. Who is the rightful possessor of the estate? We forget that Catholic Ireland has been murdered three times over by its Protestant masters.

Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are advocates for toleration; but then they think it no act of intolerance to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is, that all men secretly like to punish others for not being of the same opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only species of persecution, of which the improved feeling and advanced cultivation of the age will admit. Fire and fagot, chains and stone walls, have been clamored away; nothing remains but to mortify a man's pride, and to limit his resources, and to set a mark on him, by cutting him off from his share of political power. By this receipt, insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked. The gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded from parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say, that he lives in the nineteenth instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as intolerant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit which wounds the pride of a fellow-creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications of the same principle? The minds of these two men no more differ, because they differ in their degrees of punishment, than their bodies differ, because one wore a doublet in the time of Mary, and the other wears a coat in the reign of George. I do not accuse them of inten. tional cruelty and injustice: I am sure there are very many excellent men, who would be shocked if they could conceive themselves to be guilty of any thing like cruelty; but they innocently give a wrong name to the bad spirit which is within them, and think they are tolerant, because they are not as intolerant as they could have been in other times, but cannot be now. The true spirit is to search after God and for another life with lowliness of heart; to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no pains on those solemn supplications, which in divers tongues, and in varied forms, and in temples of a thousand shapes, but with one deep sense of human dependance, men pour forth to God.

It is completely untrue that the Catholic religion is what it was

three centuries ago, or that it is unchangeable and unchanged. These are mere words, without the shadow of truth to support them. If the Pope were to address a bull to the kingdom of Ireland, excommunicating the Duke of York, and cutting him off from the succession, for his Protestant effusion in the House of Lords, he would be laughed at as a lunatic in all the Catholic chapels in Dublin. The Catholics would not now burn Protestants as heretics. In many parts of Europe, Catholics and Protestants worship in one church. Catholics at eleven, Protestants at one; they sit in the same parliament, are elected to the same office, live together without hatred or friction, under equal laws. Who can see and know these things, and say that the Catholic religion is unchangeable and unchanged?

I have often endeavored to reflect on the causes which, from time to time, raised such a clamor against the Catholics, and I think the following are among the most conspicuous :

1. Historical recollections of the cruelties inflicted on the Protestants.

2. Theological differences.

3. A belief that the Catholics are unfriendly to liberty.

4. That their morality is not good.

5. That they meditate the destruction of the Protestant church. 6. An unprincipled clamor by men, who have no sort of belief in the danger of emancipation, but who make use of No Popery as a political engine.

7. A mean and selfish spirit of denying to others the advantages we ourselves enjoy.

8. A vindictive spirit or love of punishing others, who offend our self-love, by presuming, on important points, to entertain opinions opposite to our own.

9. Stupid compliance with the opinions of the majority.

10. To these I must, in justice and candor, add, as a tenth cause, a real apprehension on the part of honest and reasonable men, that it is dangerous to grant farther concessions to the Catholics.

To these various causes I shall make a short reply, in the order in which I have placed them.

1. Mere historical recollections are very miserable reasons for the continuation of penal and incapacitating laws, and one side has as much to recollect as the other.

2. The state has nothing to do with questions purely theolo→ gical.

3. It is ill to say this in a country whose free institutions were founded by Catholics, and it is often said by men who care no thing about free institutions.

4. It is not true.