312 WORKS OF THE REV. SIDNEY SMITH. kinder and better man than yourself; but you (if you close of this useful policy, his advisers discover that I cannot extend my letter any further at present, but you shall soon hear from me again. You tell me I an a party man. I hope I shall always be so, when I see my country in the hands of a pert London joker and a known than that he makes pretty Latin verses; the second-rate lawyer. Of the first, no other good is second seems to me to have the head of a country par If I could see good measures pursued, I care not a son, and the tongue of an Old Bailey lawyer. love for common justice, and for common sense, and I farthing who is in power; but I have a passionate abhor and despise every man who builds up his politi God bless you, reverend Abraham, and defend you from the pope, and all of us from that administration who seek power by opposing a measure which Birke, Pitt, and Fox all considered as absolutely necessary to the existence of the country. DEAR ABRAHAM, LETTER II. You admit this bill did not compel the king to elect Catholic officers, but only gave him the option of doing so if he pleased; but you add, that the king was right in not trusting such dangerous power to himself or his successors. Now, you are either to suppose that the king, for the time being, has a zeal for the Catholic If he has not, establishment, or that he has not. where is the danger of giving such an option? If you THE Catholic not respect an oath! why not? What suppose that he may be influenced by such an admiration of the Catholic religion, why did his present majesty, in the year 1804, consent to that bill which em-upon earth has kept him out of Parliament, or excludpowered the crown to station ten thousand Catholic ed him from all the offices whence he is excluded, but soldiers in any part of the kingdom, and placed them his respect for oaths? There is no law which prohibabsolutely at the disposal of the crown? If the King its a Catholic to sit in Parliament. There could be no of England for the time being is a good Protestant, such law; because it is impossible to find out what there can be no danger in making the Catholic eligible passes in the interior of any man's mind. Suppose it were in contemplation to exclude all men from certain to any thing; if he is not, no power can possibly be so dangerous as that conveyed by the bill last quoted; offices who contended for the legality of taking tithes: to which, in point of peril, Lord Howick's bill is a the only mode of discovering that fervid love of decimere joke. But the real fact is, one bill opened a mation which I know you to possess would be to tenit is lawful for a spiritual man to take, abstract, approdoor to his majesty's advisers for trick, jobbing, and der you an oath against that damnable doctrine, that intrigue; the other did not. priate, subduct, or lead away the tenth calf, sheep, lamb, ox, pigeon, duck, &c. &c. &c., and every other animal that ever existed, which of course the lawyers would take care to enumerate. sure you would rather die than take; and so the Catholic is excluded from Parliament because he will not swear that he disbelieves the leading doctrines of his religion! The Catholic asks you to abolish some oaths Then why subject him to the test of which oppress him: your answer is, that he does not respect oaths. oaths? The oaths keep him out of Parliament; why then he respects them. Turn which way you will, eíther your laws are nugatory, or the Catholic is bound by religious obligations as you are; but no eel in the well-sanded fist of a cook-maid, upon the eve of being skinned, ever twisted and writhed as an orthodox parson does when he is compelled by the gripe of reason to admit any thing in favour of a dissenter. Besides, what folly to talk to me of an oath, which, under all possible círcumstances, is to prevent the relaxation of the Catholic laws! for such a solemn appeal to God sets all conditions and contingencies at defiance. Suppose Bonaparte was to retrieve the only very great blunder he has made, and were to succeed, after repeated trials, in making an impression upon Ireland, do you think we should hear any thing of the impediment of a coronation oath? or would the spirit of this country tolerate for an hour such ministers, and such unheard-of nonsense, if the most distant prospect existed of conciliating the Catholics by every species even of the most abject concession? And yet, if your argument is good for any thing, the coronation oath ought to reject, at such a moment, every tendency to conciliation, and to bind Ireland forever to the crown of France. I found in your letter the usual remarks about fire, Now this oath am I will not dispute with you whether the pope be or so; because I am afraid it will induce his majesty's be not the Scarlet Lady of Babylon. I hope it is not chancellor of the exchequer to introduce several severe bills against Popery, if that is the case; and though he will have the decency to appoint a previous committee of inquiry as to the fact, the committee will be garbled, and the report inflammatory. Leav ing this to be settled as he pleases to settle it, I wish to inform you, that previously to the bill last passed in favour of the Catholics, at the suggestion of Mr. Pitt, and for his satisfaction, the opinions of six of the most celebrated of the foreign Catholic universities were taken as to the right of the pope to interfere in the sible deduction for existing circumstances, just and netemporal concerns of any country. The answer can-cessary wars, monstrous and unnatural rebellions, and not possibly leave the shadow of a doubt, even in the mind of Baron Maseres; and Dr. Rennel would be compelled to admit it, if three bishops lay dead at the very moment the question were put to him. To this answer might be added also the solemn declaration and signature of all the Catholics in Great Britain. I should perfectly agree with you, if the Catholics admitted such a dangerous dispensing power in the hands of the pope; but they all deny it, and laugh at it, and are ready to abjure it in the most decided manner you can devise. They obey the pope as the spiritual head of their church; but are you really so foolish as to be imposed upon by mere names?-What matters it the seven-thousandth part of a farthing who is the spiritual head of any church? Is not Mr. Wilberforce at the head of the church of Clapham? Is not Dr. Letsom at the head of the Quaker church? Is not the general assembly at the head of the church of Scotland? How is the government disturbed by these many-headed churches? or in what way is the power of the crown augmented by this almost nominal dig. nity? all other sources of human destruction. Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and the half of the Protestant population are dissenters, and as inimical to the church as the Catholics themselves. In this state of things, thumb-screws and whipping-admir. able engines of policy, as they must be considered to be-will not ultimately avail. The Catholics will hang over you; they will watch for the moment; and com pel you hereafter to give them ten times as much, against your will, as they would now be contented with, if it was voluntarily surrendered. Remember what happened in the American war; when Ireland compelled you to give her every thing she asked, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner, your claim of sovereignty over her. God Almighty grant the folly of these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public affairs! What are your dangers which threaten the estab. lishment?-Reduce this declamation to a point, and let us understand what you mean. The most ample allowance does not calculate that there would be more than twenty members who were Roman Catholics in The king appoints a fast-day once a year, and he one house, and ten in the other, if the Catholic emanmakes the bishops; and if the government would take cipation were carried into effect. Do you mean that half the pains to keep the Catholics out of the arms of these thirty members would bring in a bill to take France that it does to widen Temple Bar, or improve away the tithes from the Protestant, and to pay them Snow Hill, the king would get into his hands the ap-to the Catholic clergy? Do you mean that a Catholic pointments of the titular bishops of Ireland.-Both general would march his army into the House of ComMr. C's sisters enjoy pensions more than sufficient mons and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Mr. Duigenan? to place the two greatest dignitaries of the Irish Cath-or, that the theological writers would become all of a olic Church entirely at the disposal of the crown.- sudden more acute and more learned, if the present Every body who knows Ireland knows perfectly well, civil incapacities were removed? Do you fear for that nothing would be easier, with the expenditure of your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the a little money, than to preserve enough of the osten- English constitution? Every fear, taken separately, sible appointment in the hands of the pope to satisfy is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the scruples of the Catholics, while the real nomina- the boldness to state it. Every one conceals his ignotion remained with the crown. But, as I have before rance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic, said, the moment the very name of Ireland is men- which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of extioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feel-plaining. Whatever you think of the Catholics, there ing, common prudence, and to common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots. Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and intelligence, who, if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible. You speak of danger to the establishment: I request to know when the establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits were half so terrible? Mr. Perceval and his parsons forgot all this, in their horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense. They never see that, while they are saving these venerable ladies from perdition, Ireland may be lost, England broken down, and the Protestant Church, with all its deans, prebendaries, Percevals and Rennels, be swept into the vortex of oblivion. they are-you cannot get rid of them; your alternative is, to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potato-place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security, as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentle. men in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics?-Can you neglect them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious to every human being-but to that man who, instead of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us, and our children, and for the ruin of Troy, and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a legislator and a politician. A distinction, I perceive, is taken, by one of the most feeble noblemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political power; whereas, there is no more distinction between these two Do not, I beseech you, ever mention to me again things than there is between him who makes the dis the name of Dr. Duigenan. I have been in every cor- tinction and a booby. If I strip off the relic-covered ner of Ireland, and have studied its present strength jacket of a Catholic, and give him twenty stripes. . . and condition with no common labour. Be assured I persecute: if I say, every body in the town where Ireland does not contain at this moment less than five you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourmillions of people. There were returned in the year able offices, but you who are a Catholic... I do not 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000 houses, and there is no persecute !-What nonsense is this! as if degradation kind of question that there were about 50,000 houses was not as great an evil as bodily pain, or as severe omitted in that return. Taking, however, only the poverty; as if I could not be as great a tyrant by saynumber returned for the tax, and allowing the average ing, You shall not enjoy-as by saying, You shall suf of six to a house (a very small average for a potato- fer. The English, I believe, are as truly religious as fed people,) this brings the population to 4,200,000 any nation in Europe; I know no greater blessing, people in the year 1791; and it can be shown from but it carries with it this evil in its train, that any vil the clearest evidence, (and Mr. Newenham in his lain who will bawl out The church is in danger!' book shows it,) that Ireland for the last fifty years may get a place, and a good pension; and that any has increased in its population at the rate of 50 or administration who will do the same thing may bring 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present popula- a set of men into power who, at a moment of station. tion of Ireland at about five millions, after every posary and passive piety, would be hooted by the very You boys in the streets. But it is not all religion; it is, in LETTER III. ALL that I have so often told you, Mr. Abraham Plymley, is now coming to pass. The Scythians, in whom you and the neighbouring country gentlemen placed such confidence, are smitten hip and thigh; their Benningsen put to open shame; their magazines of train oil intercepted, and we are waking from our We shall now see if disgraceful drunkenness to all the horrors of Mr. Per. ceval and Mr. Canning. a nation is to be saved by school-boy jokes and dog. gerel rhymes, by affronting petulance, and by the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt. But these are not all the auxiliaries on which we have to depend; to these his colleague will add the strictest attention to the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government, to hassocks, to psalters, and to surplices; in the last agonies of England, he will bring in a bill to regulate You spend a great deal of ink about the character Easter-offerings; and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is on the hills of of the present prime-minister. Grant you all that you Kent. Whatever can be done by very mistaken nowrite; I say, I fear he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a tions of the piety of a Christian, and by very wretchline of policy destructive to the true interests of his country; and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. ed imitation of the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, will be done Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals! These by these two gentlemen. After all, if they both really are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked were what they both either wish to be or wish to be to in a time of the most serious public danger; but thought; if the one were an enlightened Christian, who drew from the gospel the toleration, the charity, somehow or another (if public and private virtues and the sweetness which it contains; and if the other must always be incompatible), I should prefer that really possessed any portion of the great understandhe destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or ing of his Nisus who guarded him from the weapons Cockell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, of the whigs, I should still doubt if they could save whipped his boys, and saved his country. us. But I am sure we are not to be saved by religi ous hatred, and by religious trifling; by any psalmo dy, however sweet; or by any persecution, however sharp: I am certain the sounds of Mr. Pitt's voice, and the measure of his tones, and the movement of his arms, will do nothing for us; when these tones, and movements, and voice bring us always declamation without sense or knowledge, and ridicule without good humour or conciliation. Oh, Mr. Plymley, Mr. Plymley, this never will do. Mrs. Abrahain Plymley, my sister, will be led away captive by an amorous Gaul; and Joel Plymley, your first-born will be a French drummer. The late administration did not do right; they did not build their measures upon the solid basis of facts. They should have caused several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of every religion; and the report to have been published with accompanying plates. If the viscera, and other organs of life, had been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provision of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we are provi. ded with, or as the dissenters are known to possess; then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence, and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the Catholics are really Out of sight out of mind, seems to be a proverb human creatures, endowed with the feelings of men, which applies to enemies as well as friends. Because and entitled to all their rights. But instead of this the French army was no longer seen from the cliffs of wise and prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his Dover; because the sound of cannon was no longer usual precipitation, brings forward a bill in their fa- heard by the debauched London bathers on the Sussex vour, without offering the slightest proof to the coun-coast; because the Morning Post no longer fixed the try that they were any thing more than horses and invasion sometimes for Monday, sometimes for Tuesoxen. The person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the precaution to write up-Allowed day, sometimes (positively for the last time of invaby Sir Joseph Banks to be a real quadruped: his lord- ding) on Saturday; because all these causes of terror ship might have said-Allowed by the Bench of Bish- were suspended, you conceived the power of Bonaparte to be at an end, and were setting off for Paris, with ops to be real human creatures. I could write Lord Hawkesbury the conqueror. This is precisely you twenty letters upon this subject; but I am tired, the method in which the English have acted during and so I suppose are you. Our friendship is now of the whole of the revolutionary war. If Austria or forty years standing; you know me to be a truly reli- Prussia armed, doctors of divinity immediately prin ed gious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like those passages out of Habakkuk in which the destr a cockade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument tion of the usurper by General Mac and the Duke of of a party. I love the king, but I love the people as Brunswick are so clearly predicted. If Bonapar well as the king; and if I am sorry to see his old age halted, there was a mutiny, or a dysentery. If ar molested, I am much more sorry to see four millions one of his generals were eaten up by the light troop of Catholics baffled in their expectations. If I love of Russia, and picked (as their manner is) to the bone Lord Grenville, and Lord Howick, it is because they the sanguine spirit of this country displayed itself in love their country: if I abhor ******, it is because I all its glory. What scenes of infamy did the Society know there is but one man among them who is not for the Suppression of Vice lay open to our astonished laughing at the enormous folly and credulity of the country, and that he is an ignorant and mischievous eyes: tradesmen's daughters dancing; pots of beer carried out between the first and second lessson; the bigot. As for the light and frivolous jester, of whom dark and distant rumours of indecent prints. Clouds it is your misfortune to think so highly, learn, my dear of Mr. Canning's cousins arrived by the waggon; all Abraham, that this political Killigrew, just before the breaking up of the last administration, was in actual the contractors left their cards with Mr. Rose; and treaty with them for a place; and if they had survived every plunderer of the public crawled out of his hole, like slugs, and grubs, and worms, after a shower of twenty-four hours longer, he would have been now derain. claiming against the cry of No Popery! instead of inIf my voice could have been heard at the late chan flaming it. With this practical comment on the base-ges, I should have said, 'Gently; patience; stop ness of human nature Í bid you adieu! little; the time is not yet come; the mud of Polan *The reverend, the chancellor of the exchequer ba since this was written, found time, in the heat of the se sion, to write a book on the stipends of curates. will harden, and the bowels of the French grenadiers Here is a frigate attacked by a corsair of immense will recover their tone. When honesty, good sense, strength and size, rigging cut, masts in danger of and liberality have extricated you out of your present coming by the board, four foot water in the hold, men embarrassment, then dismiss them as a matter of dropping off very fast; in this dreadful situation, how course; but you cannot spare them just now; don't be do you think the captain acts (whose name shall be in too great a hurry, or there will be no monarch to Perceval)? He calls all hands upon deck; talks to flatter, and no country to pillage; only submit for a them of king, country, glory, sweethearts, gin, French little time to be respected abroad; overlook the pain- prison, wooden shoes, old England, and hearts of oak; ful absence of the tax-gatherer for a few years; bear they give three cheers, rush to their guns, and, after a up nobly under the increase of freedom and of liberal tremendous conflict, succeed in beating off the enemy. policy for a little time, and I promise you, at the expi. Not a syllable of all this; this is not the manner in ration of that period, you shall be plundered, insulted, which the honourable commander goes to work; the disgraced, and restrained to your heart's content. Do first thing he does is to secure 20 or 30 of his prime not imagine I have any intention of putting servility sailors, who happen to be Catholics, to clap them in and canting hypocrisy permanently out of place, or of irons, and set over them a guard of as many Protesfilling up with courage and sense those offices which tants; having taken this admirable method of defendnaturally devolve upon decorous imbecility and inflex-ing himself against his infidel opponents, he goes upon ible cunning: give us only a little time to keep off the deck, reminds the sailors, in a very bitter harangue, hussars of France, and then the jobbers and jesters that they are of different religions; exhorts the Epis shall return to their birth-right, and public virtue be copal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian quarter. called by its old name of fanatacism." Such is the master; issues positive orders that the Catholics advice I would have offered to my infatuated country. should be fired at upon the first appearance of discon men; but it rained very hard in November, Brother tent; rushes through blood and brains, examining his Abraham, and the bowels of our enemies were loos- men in the catechism and 39 Articles, and positively ened, and we put our trust in white fluxes, and wet forbids every one to spunge or ram who has not taken mud; and there is nothing now to oppose to the con- the sacrament according to the Church of England. querer of the world but a small table wit, and the sal- Was it right to take out a captain made of excellent low surveyor of the meltings. British stuff, and to put in such a man as this? Is not he more like a parson, or a talking lawyer, than a thorough-bred 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 ask me if I think it possible for this country to survive the recent misfortunes of Europe?-I answer you without the slightest degree of hesitation, that, if Bonaparte lives, and a great deal is not immediately done for the conciliation of the Catholics, it does seem to me absolutely impossible but that we must perish; and take this with you, that we shall perish without exciting the slightest feeling of present or future compassion, but fall amidst the hootings and revilings of Europe, as a nation of blockheads, Methodists, and old women. If there were any great scenery, any heroic feelings, any blaze of ancient virtue, any exalted death, any termination of England that would be ever remembered, ever honoured in that western world, where liberty is now retiring, conquest would be more tolerable, and ruin more sweet; but it is doubly miserable to become slaves abroad, because we would be tyrants at home; to persecute, when we are contending against persecution; and to perish, because we have raised up worse enemies within, from our own bigotry, than we are exposed to without from the unprincipled ambition of France. It is, indeed, a most silly and afflicting spectacle to rage at such a moment against our own kindred and our own blood; to tell them they cannot be honourable in war because they are conscientious in religion; to stipulate (at the very moment when we should buy their hearts and swords at any price) that they must hold up the right hand in prayer, and not the left; and adore one common God, by turning to the east rather than to the west. What is it the Catholics ask of you? Do not exclude us from the honours and emoluments of the state, because we worship God in one way, and you worship him in another,-in a period of the deepest peace, and the fattest prosperity, this would be a fair request; it should be granted, if Lord Hawkesbury had reached Paris, if Mr. Canning's interpreter had threatened the Senate in an opening speech, or Mr. Perceval explained to them the improvements he meant to introduce into the Catholic religion; but to deny the Irish this justice now, in the present state of Europe, and in the summer months, just as the season for destroying kingdoms is coming on, is, (beloved Abraham,) whatever you may think of it, little short of positive insanity. You have an argument, I perceive, in common with many others, against the Catholics, that their demands complied with would only lead to farther exactions, and that it is better to resist them now, before any thing 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 attempt to get hold of the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster for life; would not Mr. Perceval have contended 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. 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 enand to make him feel he is in the wrong; a privilege emy; a vast privilege to feel that you are in the right, which makes you more than a man, and your antago nist 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 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 priv ilege of hearing Lord Castlereagh speak for three hours; keep his clergy from starving, soften some of the most odious powers of the tithing-man, and you will for ever lay this formidable question to rest. But This is Mr. Canning's term for the detection of public if I am wrong, and you must quarrel at last, quarrel abuses; a term invented by him, and adopted by that sim- upon just rather than upon unjust grounds; divide the ious parasite who is always grinning at his heels. Nature Catholic, and unite the Protestant; be just, and your descends down to infinite smallness. Mr. Canning has his own exertions will be more formidable and their exerparasites: and if you take a large buzzing blue-bottle fly, tions less formidable: be just, and you will take away and look at it in a microscope, you may see 20 or 30 little from their party all the best and wisest understand. ugly insects crawling about it, which doubtless think their fly to be the bluest, grandest, merriest, most important an- ings of both persuasions, aud knit them firmly to your imal in the universe, and are convinced that the world own cause. Thrice is he armed who has hís quarrel would be at an end if it ceased to buzz. just;' and ten times as much may he be taxed. In the into an idea that I am religious, and that I am doing beginning of my war, however destitute of common my duty in the most exemplary (as I certainly am in sense, every mob will roar, and every lord of the bed- the most easy) way. But then, my good Abraham, chamber address; but if you are engaged in a war this sport, admirable as it is, is become, with respect that is to last for years, and to require important sac- to the Catholics, a little dangerous; and if we are not rifices, take care to make the justice of your case so extremely careful in taking the amusement, we shall clear and so obvious, that it cannot be mistaken by tumble into the holy water, and be drowned. As it the most illiterate country gentleman who rides the seems necessary to your idea of an established church earth. Nothing, in fact, can be so grossly absurd as the to have somebody to worry and torment, suppose we argument which says, I will deny justice to you now, were to select for this purpose William Wilberforce, because I suspect future injustice from you. At this Esq., and the patent Christians of Clapham. We rate, you may lock a man up in your stable, and refuse shall by this expedient enjoy the same opportunity for to let him out because you suspect that he has an in- cruelty and injustice, without being exposed to the tention, at some future period, of robbing your hen- same risks; we will compel them to abjure vital cler. roost. You may horse-whip him at Lady-day, be-gymen by a public test, to deny that the said William cause you believe he will affront you at Midsummer. Wilberforce has any power of working miracles, You may commit a great evil, to guard against a less, touching for barrenness or any other infirmity, or that which is merely contingent, and may never happen. he is endowed with any preternatural gift whatever. You may do what you have done a century ago in Ire. We will swear them to the doctrine of good works, land, made the Catholics worse than Helots, because compel them to preach common sense, and to hear it; you suspected that they might hereafter aspire to be to frequent bishops, deans, and other high church. more than fellow-citizens; rendering their sufferings men; and to appear (once in the quarter at least) at certain from your jealousy, while yours were only some melodrame, opera, pantomime, or other light doubtful from their ambition; an ambition sure to be scenical representation; in short, we will gratify the excited by the very measures which were taken to love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old or. prevent it. thodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men The physical strength of the Catholics will not be compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacri greater because you give them a share of political fice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we power. You may, by these means, turn rebels into may do without the slightest risk, because their num friends; but I do not see how you make rebels more bers are (as yet) not very considerable. Cruelty and formidable. If they taste of the honey of lawful pow. injustice must, of course, exist; but why connect er, they will love the hive from whence they procure them with danger? Why torture a bull-dog when it; if they will struggle with us like men in the same you can get a frog or a rabbit? I am sure my propo state for civil influence, we are safe. All that I dread sal will meet with universal approbation. Do not be is, the physical strength of four millions of men com-apprehensive of any opposition from ministers. If bined with an invading French army. If you are to it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man will quarrel at last with this enormous population, still put defend it by the Gospel; if it abridges human freedom, it off as long as you can; you must gain, and cannot we know that another will find precedents for it in the lose, by the delay. The state of Europe cannot be Revolution. worse; the conviction which the Catholics entertain In the name of Heaven, what are we to gain by suf of your tyranny and injustice cannot be more alarm-fering Ireland to be rode by that faction which now ing, nor the opinions of your own people more divid- predominates over it! Why are we to endanger our ed. Time, which produces such effect upon brass and own church and state, not for 500,000 Episcopalians, marble, may inspire one minister with modesty, and but for ten or twelve great Orange families, who have another with compassion; every circumstance may be been sucking the blood of that country for these hunbetter; some certainly will be so, none can be worse; dred years last past? and the folly of the Orangemen and, after all, the evil may never happen. in playing this game themselves, is almost as absurd as ours in playing it for them. They ought to have the sense to see that their business now is to keep quietly the lands and beeves of which the fathers of the Catholics were robbed in the days of yore: they must give to their descendants the sop of political power; by contending with them for names, they will lose realities, and be compelled to beg their potatoes in a foreign land, abhorred equally by the English, who have witnessed their oppression, and by the Ca tholic Irish, who have smarted under them. You have got hold, I perceive, of all the vulgar English stories respecting the hereditary transmission of forfeited property, and seriously believe that every Catholic beggar wears the terriers of his father's land next his skin, and is only waiting for better times to cut the throat of the Protestant professor, and get drunk in the hall of his ancestors. There is one irresistible answer to this mistake, and that is, that the forfeited lands are purchased indiscriminately by Catholic and Protestant, and that the Catholic purchaser never objects to such a title. Now the land (so purchased by a Catholic) is either his own family estate, or it is not. If it is, you suppose him so desirous of coming into possession, that 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 any where 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. I admit there is a vast luxury in selecting a particular set of Christians, and in worrying them as a boy worries a puppy-dog; it is an amusement in which all the young English are brought up from their earliest days. I like the idea of saying to men who use a dif. ferent hassock from me, that till they change their hassock, they shall never be colonels, aldermen, or Parliament-men. While I am gratifying my personal insolence respecting religious forms, I fondle myself LETTER IV. man who dancedt so badly at the Court of Naples), The Protestants in Ireland are fast coming over to the Ca tholic cause. In the third year of his present majesty, and in the 30th of his own age, Mr. Isaac Hawkins Brown, then upon his travels, danced one evening at the court of Naples. His dress was a volcano silk with lava buttons. Whether (as the Neapolitan wits said) he had studied dancing under St. Vitus, or whether David, dancing in a linen vest, was his model, is not known; but Mr. Brown danced with such inconceivable alacrity and vigour, that he threw the Queen of Naples into convulsions of laughter, which terminated in a miscarriage, and changed the dynasty of the Neapolitan throne. |