kingdom; but Mr. Hawkins Brown must look before | he leaps, when his object is to crush an opposite sect in religion; false steps aid the one effect as much as they are fatal to the other; it will require not only the lapse of Mr. Hawkins Brown, but the lapse of centuries, before the absurdities of the Catholic religion are laughed at as much as they deserve to be; but surely, in the mean time, the Catholic religion is better than none; four millions of Catholics are better than four millions of wild beasts; two hundred priests, educated by our own government, are better than the same number educated by the man who means to destroy us.

mercy do than send them the example of Scotland? For what a length of years was it attempted to compel the Scotch to change their religion: horse, foot, artil lery, 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 astonishment 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 tune 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 the present moment. The true and the only remedy was applied; the Scotch were suffered to worship God nalty, and privation. No lightnings descended from heaven; the country was not ruined; the world 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.

The whole sum now appropriated by government to the religious education of four millions of Christians is 13,000l.; a sum about one hundred times as large being appropriated in the same country to about oneeighth part of this number of Protestants. When it was proposed to raise this grant from 8,000l. to 13,000l., its present amount, this sum was objected to by that most indulgent of Christians, Mr. Spencer Perceval, as enormous; he himself having secured for his own eating and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss Percevals, the rever-after their own tiresome manner, without pain, pesionary sum of 21,000l., a-year of the public money, and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster: and the best of it is, that this minister, after abusing his predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found himself compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant the sum in question; thus dissolving his pearl in vinegar, and destroying all the value of the gift by the virulence and reluctance with which it was granted.

I hear from some persons in Parliament, and from others in the sixpenny societies for debate, a great deal about unalterable laws passed at the Revolution. When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool. A law passed when there were Germany, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, and Turkey; when there was a disputed succession; when four or five hundred acres were won and lost after ten years' hard fighting; when armies were commanded by the sons of kings, and campaigns passed in an interchange of civil letters and ripe fruit; and for these laws, when the whole state of the world is completely changed, we are now, according to my Lord Hawkesbury, to hold ourselves ready to perish. It is no mean misfortune, in times like these, to be forced to say any thing about such men as Lord Hawkesbury, and to be reminded that we are governed by them; but as I am driven to it, I must take the liberty of observing, that the wisdom and liberality of my Lord Hawkesbury are of that complexion which always shrinks from the present exercise of these virtues, by praising the splendid examples of them in ages past. If he had lived at such periods, he would have opposed the Revolution by praising the Reformation, and the Reformation by speaking handsomely of the crusades. He gratifies his natural antipathy to great and courageous measures, by playing off the wisdom and courage which have ceased to influence human affairs against that wisdom and courage which living men would employ for present happiness. Besides, it happens unfortunately for the warden of the Cinque Ports, that to the principal incapacities under which the Irish suffer, they were subjected after that great and glorious revolution, to which we are indebted for so many blessings, and his lordship for the termination of so many periods. The Catholics were not excluded from the Irish House of Commons, or military commands, before the 3d and 4th of William and Mary, and the 1st and 2nd of Queen Anne.

If the great mass of the people, environed as they are on every side with Jenkinsons, Percevals, Melvilles, and other perils, were to pray for divine illumination and aid, what more could Providence in its

Perfectly ready at the same time to follow the other half of Cleopatra's example, and fo swallow the solution

himself.

Are you aware, that there is at this moment an 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 sentiments of any people. Those who disliked the union before, are quite furious against it now; those who 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 wildfire, and blaze on every opposition; and if this is 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 purpose 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 together against you. Last war, the winds, those ancient and unsubsidized 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 see that their independence is gone, without having received any single one of those advantages which they were taught to expect from the sacrifice. All good things were to flow from the union; they have none of them gained any thing.

Every man's pride is wounded by it; no man's interest | any noble and official thief would not fail to diffuse the is promoted. In the seventh year of that union, four million Catholics, lured by all kinds of promises to yield up the separate dignity and sovereignty of their country, are forced to squabble with such a man as Mr. Spencer Perceval for five thousand pounds with which to educate their children in their own mode of worship; he, the same Mr. Spencer, having secured to his own Protestant self a reversionary portion of the public money amounting to four times that sum. A senior proctor of the University of Oxford, the head of a house, or the examining chaplain to a bishop, may believe these things can last; but every man of the world, whose understanding has been exercised in the business of life, must see (and see with a breaking heart) that they will soon come to a fearful termination.

most heartfelt satisfaction over the larcenous and burglarious world. Observe, I do not say because the lower Catholics are affected by what concerns their superiors, that they are not affected by what concerns themselves. There is no disguising the horrid truth; there must be some relaxation with respect to tithe : this is the cruel and heart-rending price which must be paid for national preservation. I feel how little existence will be worth having, if any alteration, however slight, is made in the property of Irish rectors; I am con scious how much such changes must affect the daily and hourly comforts of every Englishman; I shail feel too happy if they leave Europe untouched, and are not ultimately fatal to the destinies of America; but I am madly bent upon keeping foreign enemies out of the British empire, and my limited understanding presents me with no other means of effecting my ob

agree to the delay. I sincerely hope this reign may last many years, yet the delay of a single session of Parliament may be fatal; but if another year elapses without some serious concession made to the Catho lics, I believe, before God, that all future pledges and concessions will be made in vain. I do not think that peace will do you any good under such circumstances; if Bonaparte gives you a respite, it will only be to get ready the gallows on which he means to hang you.The Catholic and the dissenter can unite in peace as well as war. If they do, the gallows is ready; and your executioner, in spite of the most solemn promi ses, will turn you off the next hour.

Our conduct to Ireland, during the whole of this war, has been that of a man who subscribes to hospi-ject. tals, weeps at charity sermons, carries out broth aud You talk of waiting till another reign, before any alblankets to beggars, and then comes home and beats teration is made; a proposal full of good sense and his wife and children. We had compassion for the vic-good nature, if the measure in question were to pull tims of all other oppression and injustice, except our down St. James's Palace, or to alter Kew Gardens.own. If Switzerland was threatened, away went a Will Bonaparte agree to put off his intrigues, and his treasury clerk with a hundred thousand pounds for invasion of Ireland? If, so, I will overlook the ques Switzerland; large bags of inoney were kept constant-tion of justice, and, finding the danger suspended, ly under sailing orders; upon the slightest demonstration towards Naples, down went Sir William Hamilton upon his knees, and prayed for the love of St. Januarius they would help us off with a little money; all the arts of Machiavel were resorted to, to persuade Europe to borrow; troops were sent off in all directions to save the Catholic and Protestant world: the pope himself was guarded by a regiment of English dragoons; if the Grand Lama had been at hand, he would have had another; every Catholic clergyman, who had the good fortune to be neither English nor Irish, was immediately provided with lodgings, soup, crucifix, missal, chapel-beads, relics, and holy water; if Turks had landed, Turks would have received an With every disposition to please (where to please order from the treasury for coffee, opium, korans, and within fair and rational limits is a high duty), it is seraglios. In the midst of all this fury of saving and impossible for public men to be long silent about the defending, this crusade for conscience and Christiani-Catholics; pressing evils are not got rid of because ty, there was an universal agreement among all descriptions of people to continue every species of internal persecution; to deny at home every just right which had been denied before; to pummel poor Dr. Abraham Rees and his dissenters; and to treat the unhappy Catholics of Ireland as if their tongues were mute, their heels cloven, their nature brutal, and designedly subjected by Providence to their Orange mas

ters.

How would my admirable brother, the Rev. Abraham Plymley, like to be marched to a Catholic chapel, to be sprinkled with the sanctified contents of a pump, to hear a number of false quantities in the Latin tongue, and to see a number of persons occupied in making right angles upon the breast and forehead?And if all this would give you so much pain, what right have you to march Catholic soldiers to a place of worship where there is no aspersion, no rectangular gestures, and where they understand every word they hear, having first, in order to get him to enlist, made a solemn promise to the contrary? Can you wonder, after this, that the Catholic priest stops the recruiting in Ireland, as he is now doing to a most alarming degree?

they are not talked of. A man may command his family to say nothing more about the stone, and surgical operation; but the poderous malice still lies upon the nerve, and gets so big, that the patient breaks his own law of silence, clamours for the knife, and expires under its late operation. Believe me, you talk folly, when you talk of suppressing the Catholic question. I wish to God the case admitted of such a remedy: bad as it is, it does not admit of it. If the wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be heard ere long in the madness of mobs, and the conflicts of armed men.

I observe, it is now universally the fashion to speak of the first personage in the state as the great obstacle to the measure. In the first place, I am not bound to believe such rumours because I hear them; and in the next place, I object to such language as unconstitu tional. Whoever retains his situation in the ministry while the incapacities of the Catholics remain, is the advocate of those incapacities; and to him, and to him only, am I to look for responsibility. But waive this question of the Catholics, and put a general case; How is a minister of this country to act when the The late question concerning military rank did not conscientious scruples of his sovereign prevent the individually affect the lowest persons of the Catholic execution of a measure deemed by him absolutely ne persuasion; but do you imagine they do not sympa- cessary to the safety of the country? His conduct is thize with the honour and disgrace of their superiors? quite clear-he should resign. But what is his succes Do you think that satisfaction and dissatisfaction do sor to do?-Resign. But is the king to be left withnot travel down from Lord Fingal to the most potato- out ministers, and is he in this manner to be compelled less Catholic in Ireland, and that the glory or shame to act against his own conscience? Before I answer of the sect is not felt by many more than these condi- this, pray tell me in my turn, what better defence is tions personally and corporally affect? Do you sup- there against the machinations of a wicked, or the pose that the detection of Sir H. M. and the disap- errors of a weak monarch, than the impossibility of pointment of Mr. Perceval in the matter of the Duchy finding a minister who will lend himself to vice and of Lancaster, did not affect every dabbler in public folly? Every English monarch, in such a predica property? Depend upon it these things were felt ment, would sacrifice his opinions and views to such through all the gradations of small plunderers, down a clear expression of the public will; and it is one me to him who filches a pound of tobacco from the king's thod in which the constitution aims at bringing about warehouses; while, on the contrary, the acquittal of such a sacrifice. You may say, if you please, the

a century ago, and that every year the shoots are clipped the moment they appear above ground: it appears, upon farther inquiry, that the hedge never ought to have existed at all; that it originated in the malice of antiquated quarrels, and was cut down be cause it subjected you to vast inconvenience, and broke up your intercourse with a country absolutely necessary to your existence. If the remains of this hedge serve only to keep up an irritation in your neighbours, and to remind them of the feuds of former times, good nature and good sense teach you that you ought to grub it up, and cast it into the oven. This is the exact state of these two laws; and yet it is made a great argument against concession to the Catholics, that it involves their repeal; which is to say, Do not make me relinquish a folly that will lead to my ruin; because, if you do, I must give up other follies ten times greater than this.

I confess, with all our bulwarks and hedges, it mortifies me to the very quick, to contrast with our matchless stupidity and inimitable folly, the conduct of Bonaparte upon religious persecution. At the moment when we are tearing the crucifixes from the necks of the Catholics, and washing pious mud from the foreheads of the Hindoos; at that moment this man is as

ruler of a state is forced to give up his object, when the natural love of place and power will tempt no one to assist him in its attainment. This may be force but it is force without injury, and therefore without blame. I am not to be beat out of these obvious reasonings, and ancient constitutional provisions, by the term conscience. There is no fantasy, however wild, that a man may not persuade himself that he cherishes from motives of conscience; eternal war against impious France, or rebellious America, or Catholic Spain, may in times to come be scruples of conscience. One English monarch may, from scruples of conscience, wish to abolish every trait of religious persecution; another monarch may deem it his absolute and indispensable duty to make a slight provision for dissenters out of the revenues of the Church of England. So that you see, Brother Abraham, there are cases where it would be the duty of the best and most loyal subjects to oppose the conscientious scruples of their sovereign, still taking care that their actions were constitutional, and their modes respectful. Then you come upon me with personal questions, and say, that no such dangers are to be apprehended now under our present gracious sovereign, of whose good qualities we must be all so well convinced. All these sorts of discussions I beg leave to decline; what Isembling the very Jews at Paris, and endeavouring to have said upon constitutional topics, I mean of course for general, not for particular application. I agree with you in all the good you have said of the powers that be, and I avail myself of the opportunity of pointing out general dangers to the constitution, at a moment when we are so completely exempted from their present influence. I cannot finish this letter without expressing my surprise and pleasure at your abuse of the servile addresses poured in upon the throne; nor can I conceive a greater disgust to a monarch with a true English heart, than to see such a question as that of Catholic emancipation argued, not with a reference to its justice or its importance, but universally considered to be of no farther consequence than as it af fects his own private feelings. That these sentiments should be mine, is not wonderful; but how they come to be yours, does, I confess, fill me with surprise. Are you moved by the arrival of the Irish brigade at Antwerp, and the amorous violence which awaits Mrs. Plymley?

Heu vatum ignaræ mentes.

These bulwarks, without which no clergyman thinks he could sleep with his accustomed soundness, have actually not been in existence since any man now living has taken holy orders. Every year the indemnity act pardons past breaches of these two laws, and prevents any fresh actions of informers from coming to a conclusion before the period for the next indemnity bill arrives; so that these penalties, by which alone the church remains in existence, have not had one moment's operation for sixty-four years. You will say the legislature, during the whole of this period, has reserved to itself the discretion of suspending, or not suspending. But had not the legislature the right of re-enacting, if it was necessary? And now, when you have kept the rod over these people (with the most scandalous abuse of all principle) for sixty-four years, and not found it necessary to strike once, is not that the best of all reasons why the rod should be laid aside? You talk to me of a very valua. ble hedge running across your fields which you would not part with on any account. I go down, expecting to find a limit impervious to cattle, and highly useful for the preservation of property; but, to my utter astonishment, I find that the hedge was cut down half

give them stability and importance. I shall never be reconciled to mending shoes in America; but I see it must be my lot, and I will then take a dreadful revenge upon Mr. Perceval, if I catch him preaching within ten miles of me. I cannot for the soul of me conceive whence this man has gained his notions of Christianity; he has the most evangelical charity for errors in arithmetic, and the most inveterate malice against errors in conscience. While he rages against those whom, in the true spirit of the Gospel he ought to indulge, he forgets the only instance of severity which that Gospel contains, and leaves the jobbers, and contractors, and money-changers at their seats, without a single stripe.

You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ev er be ruined and conquered; and for no other reason that I can find, but because it seems so very odd it should be ruined and conquered. Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian and Prussian Plymleys. But the English are brave; so were all these nations. You might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as useless as a first-rate-man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen, or Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this had no means of acquiring experience; but I do say it to the disparagement of English officers; they have half alarmed enough, or to entertain that sense of our to create alarm; for we do not appear to me to be danger which leads to the most obvious means of selfdefence. As for the spirit of the peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedge-rows, and through plate-racks and hen-coops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the English; and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of war.Old wheat and beans blazing for twenty miles round; cart mares shot; sows of Lord Somerville's breed running wild over the country; the minister of the parish wounded solely in his hinder parts; Mrs. Plymley in fits; all these scenes of war an Austrian or a Russian has seen three or four times over; but it is now three centuries since an English pig has fallen in a fair battle upon English ground, or a farm-house been rifled, or a clergyman's wife been subjected to any other proposals of love than the connubial endearments of her sleek and orthodox mate. The old edition of Plutarch's Lives, which lies in the corner of your parlour window, has contributed to work you up to the most romantic expectations of our Roman behaviour. You are persuaded that Lord Amherst will defend Kew Bridge like Cocles; that some maid of honour will break away from her captivity, and swim over the Thames; that the Duke of York will burn his capitulating hand; and little Mr. Sturges Bourne* give forty years' purchase

*There is nothing more objectionable in Plymley's Letters

for Moulsham Hall, while the French are encamped upon it. I hope we shall witness all this, if the French do come; but in the mean time I am so enchanted with the ordinary English behaviour of these invaluable persons, that I earnestly pray no opportunity may be given them for Roman valour, and for those very un-Roman pensions which they would all, of course, take especial care to claim in consequence. But whatever was our conduct, if every ploughman was as great a hero as he who was called from his oxen to save Rome from her enemies, I should still say, that at such a crisis you want the affections of all your subjects in both islands; there is no spirit which you must alienate, no heart you must avert; every man must feel he has a country, and that there is an urgent and pressing cause why he should expose himself to death.

mistaken zeal to attempt to connect one religion with freedom and another with slavery! Who laid the foundations of English liberty? What was the mixed reli. gion of Switzerland? What has the Protestant religion done for liberty in Denmark, in Sweden, throughout the north of Germany and Prussia? The purest religion in the world, in my humble opinion, is the religion of the Church of England; for its preservation (so far as it is exercised without intruding upon the liberties of others), I am ready at this moment to venture my present life, and but through that religion I have no hopes of any other; yet I am not forced to be silly because I am pious; nor will I ever join in eulogiums on my faith, which every man of common reading and common sense can so easily refute.

You have either done too much for the Catholics (worthy Abraham), or too little; if you had intended to refuse them political power, you should have retused them civil rights. After you had enabled them to acquire property, after you had conceded to them all you did concede in 78 and 93, the rest is wholly out of your power; you may choose whether you will give the rest in an honourable or a disgraceful mode, but it is utterly out of your power to withhold it.

The effects of penal laws, in matters of religion, are never confined to those limits in which the legislature intended they should be placed; it is not only that I am excluded from certain offices and dignities because I am a Catholic, but the exclusion carries with it a certain stigma, which degrades ine in the eyes of the monopolizing sect, and the very name of my religion becomes odious. These effects are so very striking in In the last year, land to the amount of eight hundred England, that I solemnly believe blue and red baboons thousand pounds was purchased by the Catholics in to be more popular here than Catholics and Presbyte- Ireland. Do you think it possible to be-Perceval, and rians; they are more understood, and there is a great-be-Canning, and be-Castlereagh such a body of men as er disposition to do something for them. When a this out of their cominon rights and their sense? Mr. country squire hears of an ape, his first feeling is to George Canning may laugh and joke at the idea of Progive it nuts and apples; when he hears of a dissenter, testant bailiffs ravishing Catholic ladies, under the 9th his immediate impulse is to commit it to the county clause of the sunset bill; but if some better remedy is jail, to shave its head, to alter its customary food, and not applied to the distractions of Ireland than the to have it privately whipped. This is no caricature, jocularity of Mr. Canning, they will soon put an end to but an accurate picture of national feelings, as they his pension, and to the pension of those near and dear degrade and endanger us at this very moment. The relatives,' for whose eating, drinking, washing, and cloIrish Catholic gentleman would bear his legal disabil- thing, every man in the United Kingdoms now pays ities with greater temper, if these were all he had to his two-pence or three-pence a year. You may call bear-if they did not enable every Protestant cheese- these observations coarse, if you please; but I have monger and tide-waiter to treat him with contempt.- no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man He is branded on the forehead with a red-hot iron, and breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, treated like a spiritual felon, because, in the highest of to wear treasury ribands, and then that we are to be all considerations, he is led by the noblest of all guides, told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful his own disinterested conscience. and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it! If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the case of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame it? Every body seems hitherto to have spared a man who never spares any body.

Why are nonsense and cruelty a bit the better because they are enacted? If Providence, which gives wine and oil, had blest us with that tolerant spirit which makes the countenance more pleasant and the heart more glad than these can do; if our statute book had never been defiled with such infamous laws, the sepulchral Spencer Perceval would have been hauled through the dirtiest horse-pond in Hampstead, had he ventured to propose them. But now persecution is good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from whence it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors; when such laws are repealed, they will be cruelty and madness; till they are repealed, they are policy and

caution.

I was somewhat amused with the imputation brought against the Catholics by the University of Oxford, that they are enemies to liberty. I immediately turned to my History of England, and marked as an historical error that passage in which it is recorded that, in the reign of Queen Anne, the famous decree of the University of Oxford, respecting passive obedience, was ordered by the House of Lords, to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman, as contrary to the liberty of the subject, and the law of the land. Nevertheless, I wish, whatever be the modesty of those who impute, that the imputation was a little more true, the Catholic cause would not be quite so desperate with the present administration. I fear, however, that the hatred to liberty in these poor devoted wretches may ere long appear more doubtful than it is at present to the vicechancellor and his clergy, inflamed as they doubtless are, with classical examples of republican virtue, and panting as they always have been, to reduce the power of the crown within narrower and safer limits. What

than the abuse of Mr. Sturges Bourne, who is an honourable able, and excelient person; but such are the malevolent effects

of

party spirit.

As for the enormous wax candles, and superstitious mummeries, and painted jackets of the Catholic priests, I fear them not. Tell me that the world will return again under the influence of the small-pox; that Lord Castlereagh will hereafter oppose the power of the court; that Lord Howick and Mr. Grattan will do each of them a mean and dishonourable action; that any body who has heard Lord Redesdale speak once will knowingly and willingly hear him again, that Lord Eldon has assented to the fact of two and two making four, without shedding tears, or expressing the smallest doubt or scruple; tell me any other thing ab surd or incredible; but, for the love of common sense, let me hear no more of the danger to be apprehended from the general diffusion of Popery. It is too absurd to be reasoned upon; every man feels it is nonsense when he hears it stated, and so does every man while he is stating it.

I cannot imagine why the friends to the church establishment should entertain such an horror of seeing the doors of Parliament flung open to Catholics, and view so passively the enjoyment of that right by the Presbyterians, and by every other species of dissenter. In their tenets, in their church government, in the nature of their endowments, the dissenters are infinitely more distant from the Church of England than Catho lics are; yet the dissenters have never been excluded from Parliament. There are 45 members in one house and 16 in the other, who always are dissenters. There is no law which would prevent every member of the Lords and Commons from being dissenters. 'The Catholics could not bring into Parliament half the nam ber of Scotch members; and yet one exclusions of such immense importance, because it has taken place; and the other no human being thinks of, because