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 theological.

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.

5. Make their situation so comfortable, that it will not be worth their while to attempt an enterprise so desperate.

6. This is an unfair political trick, because it is too dangerous, it is spoiling the table in order to win the game.

The 7th and 8th causes exercise a great share of influence in every act of intolerance. The 9th must, of course, comprehend the greatest number.

10. Of the existence of such a class of No-Poperists as this, it would be the height of injustice to doubt, but I confess it excites in me a very great degree of astonishment.

Suppose, after a severe struggle, you put the Irish down, if they are mad and foolish enough to recur to open violence; yet are the retarded industry and the misapplied energies of so many millions of men to go for nothing? Is it possible to forget all the wealth, peace, and happiness, which are to be sacrificed for twenty years to come, to these pestilential and disgraceful squabbles? Is there no horror in looking forward to a long period in which men, instead of ploughing and spinning, will curse and hate, and burn and murder?

There seems to me a sort of injustice and impropriety in our deciding at all on the Catholic question. It should be left to those Irish Protestants whose shutters are bullet-proof; whose dinnertable is regularly spread with knife, fork, and cocked pistol; saltcellar and powder-flask. Let the opinion of those persons be resorted to, who sleep in sheet iron night-caps; who have fought so often and so nobly before their scullery door, and defended the parlor passage as bravely as Leonidas defended the pass of Thermopyle. The Irish Protestant members see and know the state of their own country. Let their votes decide the case. We are quiet and at peace; our homes may be defended with a feather, and our doors fastened with a pin; and as ignorant of what armed and insulted Popery is as we are of the state of New Zealand, we pretend to regulate by our clamors the religious factions of Ireland.

It is a very pleasant thing to trample on Catholics, and it is also a very pleasant thing to have an immense number of pheasants running about your woods; but there come thirty or forty poachers in the night, and fight with thirty or forty game preservers; some are killed, some fractured, some scalped, some maimed for life. Poachers are caught up and hanged; a vast body of hatred and revenge accumulates in the neighborhood of the great man; and he says the "sport is not worth the candle. The preservation of game is a very agreeable thing, but I will not sacrifice

'A great majority of Irish members voted for Catholic emancipation.

the happiness of my life to it. This amusement, like any other, may be purchased too dearly." So it is with the Irish Protestants, they are finding out that Catholic exclusion may be purchased too dearly. Maimed cattle, fired ricks, threatening letters, barricadoed houses to endure all this, is to purchase superiority at too dear a rate, and this is the inevitable state of two parties, the one of whom are unwilling to relinquish their ancient monopoly of power, while the other party have, at length, discovered their strength, and are determined to be free.

Gentlemen (with the best intentions, I am sure) meet together in a county town, and enter into resolutions that no farther concessions are to be made to the Catholics; but if you will not let them into parliament, why not allow them to be king's counsel, or serjeants at law? Why are they excluded by law from some corporations in Ireland, and admissible, though not admitted, to others? I think before such general resolutions of exclusion are adopted, and the rights and happiness of so many millions of people disposed of, it would be decent and proper to obtain some tolerable information of what the present state of the Irish Catholics is, and of the vast number of insignificant offices from which they are excluded. Keep them from parliament if you think it right, but do not, therefore, exclude them from any thing else, to which you think Catholics may be fairly admitted without danger; and as to their content or discontent, there can be no sort of reason why discontent should not be lessened, though it cannot be removed.

You are shocked by the present violence and abuse used in the Irish Association by whom are they driven to it? and whom are you to thank for it? Is there a hope left to them? Is any term of endurance alluded to? any scope or boundary to their patience ? Is the minister waiting for opportunities? Have they reason to believe that they are wished well to by the greatest of the great? Have they brighter hopes in another reign? Is there one clear spot in the horizon? any thing that you have left to them, but that disgust, hatred, and despair, which breaking out into wild eloquence, and acting on a wild people, are preparing every day a mass of treason and disaffection, which may shake this empire to its very centre: and you may laugh at Daniel O'Connel, and treat him with contempt, and turn his metaphors into ridicule; but Daniel has, after all, a great deal of real and powerful eloquence; and a strange sort of misgiving sometimes comes across me, that Daniel and the Doctor are not quite so great fools as many most respectable country clergymen believe them to be.

You talk of their abuse of the Reformation, but is there any end to the obloquy and abuse with which the Catholics are, on every

point, and from every quarter, assailed? Is there any one folly, vice, or crime, which the blind fury of Protestants does not lavish on them? And do you suppose all this is to be heard in silence, and without retaliation? Abuse, as much as you please, if you are going to emancipate, but if you intend to do nothing for the Catholics but to call them names, you must not be out of temper, if you receive a few ugly appellations in return.

The great object of men who love party better than truth, is to have it believed that the Catholics alone have been persecutors; but what can be more flagrantly unjust than to take our notions of history only from the conquering and triumphant party? If you think the Catholics have not their Book of Martyrs as well as the Protestants, take the following enumeration of some of their most learned and careful writers.

The whole number of Catholics who have suffered death in England, for the exercise of the Roman Catholic religion, since the Reformation:

Henry VIII.

Elizabeth

Henry VIII. with consummate impartiality, burnt three Protestants and hanged four Catholics for different errors in religion, on the same day, and at the same place. Elizabeth burnt two Dutch Anabaptists for some theological tenets, July 22, 1575, Fox the martyrologist vainly pleading with the queen in their favor. In 1579, the same Protestant queen cut off the hand of Stubbs, the author of a tract against Popish connexion, of Singleton, the printer, and Page, the disperser, of the book. Camden saw it done. Warburton properly says it exceeds in cruelty any thing done by Charles I. On the 4th of June, Mr. Elias Thacker and Mr. John Capper, two ministers of the Brownist persuasion, were hanged at St. Edmond's-bury, for dispersing books against the Common Prayer. With respect to the great part of the Catholic victims, the law was fully and literally executed; after being hanged up, they were cut down alive, dismembered, ripped up, and their bowels burnt before their faces; after which, they were beheaded and quartered. The time employed in this butchery was very considerable, and, in one instance, lasted more than half an hour.