eagerly against the injustice of refusing moderate requests, because immoderate ones may hereafter be made? Would he not have said (and said truly), Leave such exorbitant attempts as these to the general indignation of the Commons, who will take care to defeat them when they do occur; but do not refuse me the Irons and the Meltings now, because I may totally lose sight of all moderation hereafter? Leave hereafter to the spirit and the wisdom of hereafter; and do not be niggardly now, from the apprehension that men as wise as you should be profuse in times to come.

hearts, gin, French prison, wooden | tempt to get hold of the revenues of shoes, Old England, and hearts of oak: the Duchy of Lancaster for life; would they give three cheers, rush to their not Mr. Perceval have contended guns, and, after a tremendous conflict, succeed in beating off the enemy. Not a syllable of all this: this is not the manner in which the honourable Commander goes to work: the first thing be does is to secure 20 or 30 of his prime sailors who happen to be Catholics, to clap them in irons, and set over them a guard of as many Protestants; having taken this admirable method of defending himself against his infidel opponents, he goes upon deck, reminds the sailors, in a very bitter harangue, that they are of different religions; exhorts the Episcopal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian quartermaster; issues positive orders that the Catholics should be fired at upon the first appearance of discontent; rushes through blood and brains, examining his men in the Catechism and 39 Articles, and positively forbids every one to sponge or ram who has not taken the Sacrament according to the Church of England. Was it right to take out a captain made of excellent British stuff, and to put in such a man as this? Is not he more like a parson, or a talking lawyer, than a thoroughbred seaman? And built as she is of heart of oak, and admirably manned, is it possible with such a captain, to save this ship from going to the bottom?

You have an argument, I perceive, in common with many others, against the Catholics, that their demands complied with would only lead to further exactions, and that it is better to resist them now, before anything is conceded, than hereafter, when it is found that all concessions are in vain. I wish the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses this reasoning to exclude others from their just rights, had tried its efficacy, not by his understanding, but by (what are full of much better things) his pockets. Suppose the person to whom he applied for the Meltings had withstood every plea of wife and fourteen children, no business, and good character, and refused him this paltry little office, because he might hereafter at

VOL. II.

You forget, Brother Abraham, that it is a vast art (where quarrels cannot be avoided) to turn the public opinion in your favour and to the prejudice of your enemy; a vast privilege to feel that you are in the right, and to make him feel that he is in the wrong: a privilege which makes you more than a man, and your antagonist less; and often secures victory, by convincing him who contends, that he must submit to injustice if he submits to defeat. Open every rank in the army and the navy to the Catholic; let him purchase at the same price as the Protestant (if either Catholic or Protestant can purchase such refined pleasures) the privilege of hearing Lord Castlereagh speak for three hours; keep his clergy from starving, soften some of the most odious powers of the tything-man, and you will for ever lay this formidable question to rest. But if I am wrong, and you must quarrel at last, quarrel upon just rather than unjust grounds; divide the Catholic, and unite the Protestant; be just, and your own exertions will be more formidable and their excrtions less formidable; be just, and you will take away from their party all the best and wisest understandings of both persuasions, and knit them firmly to your own cause. "Thrice is he armed who has his quarrel just;" and ten times as much may he be taxed. In the beginning of any war, however destitute of common sense, every mob

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will roar, and every Lord of the Bed-effect upon brass and marble, may inchamber address; but if you are en-spire one Minister with modesty, and gaged in a war that is to last for years, another with compassion; every cir and to require important sacrifices, take cumstance may be better; some certainly care to make the justice of your case will be so, none can be worse; and, so clear and so obvious, that it cannot after all, the evil may never happen. be mistaken by the most illiterate You have got hold, I perceive, of all country gentleman who rides the earth. the vulgar English stories respecting Nothing, in fact, can be so grossly ab- the hereditary transmission of forfeited surd as the argument which says, I will property, and seriously believe that deny justice to you now, because I every Catholic beggar wears the ter suspect future injustice from you. At riers of his father's land next his skin, this rate, you may lock a man up in and is only waiting for better times your stable, and refuse to let him out, to cut the throat of the Protestant because you suspect that he has an possessor, and get drunk in the hall of intention, at some future period, of his ancestors. There is one irresistible robbing your hen-roost. You may answer to this mistake, and that is, that horsewhip him at Lady-day, because the forfeited lands are purchased inyou believe he will affront you at Mid- discriminately by Catholic and Prosummer. You may commit a greater testant, and that the Catholic purchaser evil, to guard against a less which is never objects to such a title. Now the merely contingent, and may never hap-land (so purchased by a Catholic) is pen. You may do what you have done either his own family estate, or it is a century ago in Ireland, made the not. If it is, you suppose him so deCatholics worse than Helots, because sirous of coming into possession, that you suspected that they might hereafter aspire to be more than fellow-citizens; rendering their sufferings certain from your jealousy, while yours were only doubtful from their ambition; an ambition sure to be excited by the very measures which were taken to prevent it.

he resorts to the double method of rebellion and purchase; if it is not his own family estate of which he becomes the purchaser, you suppose him first to purchase, then to rebel, in order to defeat the purchase. These things may happen in Ireland; but it is totally impossible they can happen anywhere else. In fact, what land can any man of any sect purchase in Ireland, but forfeited property? In all other oppressed countries which I have ever heard of, the rapacity of the conqueror was bounded by the territorial limits in which the objects of his avarice were contained; but Ireland has been actually confiscated twice over, as a cat is twice killed by a wicked parish boy.

The physical strength of the Catholics will not be greater because you give them a share of political power. You may by these means turn rebels into friends; but I do not see how you make rebels more formidable. If they taste of the honey of lawful power, they will love the hive from whence they procure it; if they will struggle with us like men in the same state for civil influence, we are safe. All that I dread is, the I admit there is a vast luxury in physical strengh of four millions of men selecting a particular set of Christians, combined with an invading French and in worrying them as a boy worries army. If you are to quarrel at last a puppy dog; it is an amusement in with this enormous population, still which all the young English are brought put it off as long as you can; you must up from their earliest days. I like the gain, and cannot lose, by the delay. idea of saying to men who use a difThe state of Europe cannot be worse; ferent hassock from me, that till they the conviction which the Catholics en- change their hassock, they shall never tertain of your tyranny and injustice be Colonels, Aldermen, or Parliamentcannot be more alarming, nor the men. While I am gratifying my peropinions of your own people more sonal insolence respecting religious divided. Time, which produces such forms, I fondle myself into an idea

doubted doubt no more: those who were friendly to it have exchanged that friendship for the most rooted aversion: in the midst of all this (which is by far the most alarming symptom), there is the strongest disposition on the part of the Northern Dissenters to unite with the Catholics, irritated by the faithless injustice with which they have been treated. If this combination does take place (mark what I say to you), you will have meetings all over Ireland for the cry of No Union; that cry will spread like wild-fire, and blaze over every opposition; and if this be the case, there is no use in mincing the matter, Ireland is gone, and the deathblow of England is struck; and this event may happen instantly- before Mr. Canning and Mr. Hookham Frere have turned Lord Howick's last speech into doggerel rhyme; before "the near and dear relations have received another quarter of their pension, or Mr. Perceval conducted the Curates' Salary Bill safely to a third reading.If the mind of the English people, cursed as they now are with that madness of religious dissension which has been breathed into them for the purposes of private ambition, can be alarmed by any remembrances, and warned by any events, they should never forget how nearly Ireland was lost to this country during the American war; that it was saved merely by the jealousy of the Protestant Irish towards the Catholics, then a much more insignificant and powerless body than they now are. The Catholic and the Dissenter have since combined to

send them the example of Scotland? | sentiments of any people. Those who For what a length of years was it disliked the Union before are quite attempted to compel the Scotch to furious against it now; those who change their religion: horse, foot, artillery, and armed Prebendaries, were sent out after the Presbyterian parsons and their congregations. The Percevals of those days called for blood: this call is never made in vain, and blood was shed; but to the astonish ment and horror of the Percevals of those days, they could not introduce the Book of Common Prayer, nor prevent that metaphysical people from going to heaven their true way, instead of our true way. With a little oatmeal for food, and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with the one hand, and holding his Calvinistical creed in the other, Sawney ran away to his flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tane his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles. But Sawney brought up his unbreeched offspring in a cordial hatred of his oppressors; and Scotland was as much a part of the weakness of England then, as Ireland is at this moment. The true and the only remedy was applied; the Scotch were suffered to worship God after their own tiresome manner, without pain, penalty, and privation. No lightning descended from heaven; the country was not ruined; the world is not yet come to an end; the dignitaries, who foretold all these consequences, are utterly forgotten, and Scotland has ever since been an increasing source of strength to Great Britain. In the six hundredth year of our empire over Ireland, we are making laws to transport a man, if he is found out of his house after eight o'clock at night. That this is necessary, I know too well; but tell me why it is necessary? It is not necessary in Greece, where

the Turks are masters.

Are you aware that there is at this moment a universal clamour throughout the whole of Ireland against the Union? It is now one month since I returned from that country; I have never seen so extraordinary, so alarming, and so rapid a change in the

gether against you. Last war, the winds, those ancient and unsubsidised allies of England, the winds, upon which English ministers depend as much for saving kingdoms as washerwomen do for drying clothes; the winds stood your friends: the French could only get into Ireland in small numbers, and the rebels were defeated. Since then, all the remaining kingdoms of Europe have been destroyed; and the Irish sce that their national inde