IV. ED. Cap. 3.

"An act, whereby letters patent of pardon from the king to those that sue to Rome for certain benefices is void. Rot. Parl.

"Item, At the request of the commons, it is ordeyned and established, by authority of the said Parliament, that all maner letters patents of the king, of pardons or pardon granted by the king, or hereafter to be granted, to any provisor that claim any title by the bulls of the Pope to any maner benefices, where, at the time of the impetrating of the said bulls of provision, the benefice is full of an incumbent, that then the said letters patents of pardon or pardons be void in law and of none effect."

When, by every expedient of force and policy, by a war of some centuries, by extirpating a number of the old, and by bringing in a number of new people full of those opinions and intending to propagate them, they had fully compassed their object, they suddenly took another turn,—commenced an opposite persecution, made heavy laws, carried on mighty wars, inflicted and suffered the worst evils, extirpated the mass of the old, brought in new inhabitants; and they continue at this day an oppressive system, and may for four hundred years to come, to eradicate opinions which by the same violent means they had been four hundred years endeavoring by every means to establish. They compelled the people to submit, by the forfeiture of all their civil rights, to the Pope's authority, in its most extravagant and unbounded sense, as a giver of kingdoms; and now they refuse even to tolerate them in the most moderate and chastised sentiments concerning it. No country, I believe, since the world began, has suffered so much on account of religion, or has been so variously harassed both for Popery and for Protestantism.

It will now be seen, that, even if these laws could be supposed agreeable to those of Nature in these particulars, on another and almost as strong a principle they are yet unjust, as being contrary to positive compact, and the public faith most solemnly plighted. On the surrender of Limerick, and some other Irish garrisons, in the war of the Revolution, the Lords Justices of Ireland and the commander-in-chief of the king's forces signed a capitulation with the Irish, which was afterwards ratified by the king himself by inspeximus under the great seal of England. It contains some public articles relative to the whole body of the Roman Catholics in that kingdom, and some with regard to the security of the greater part of the inhabitants of five counties. What the latter were, or in what manner they were observed, is at this day of much less public concern. The former are two,—the first and the ninth. The first is of this tenor:—"The Roman Catholics of this kingdom [Ireland] shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles the Second. And their Majesties, as soon as affairs will permit them to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, will endeavor to procure the said Roman Catholics such farther security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion." The ninth article is to this effect:—"The oath to be administered to such Roman Catholics as submit to their Majesties' government shall be the oath abovesaid, and no other,"—viz., the oath of allegiance, made by act of Parliament in England, in the first year of their then Majesties; as required by the second of the Articles of Limerick. Compare this latter article with the penal laws, as they are stated in the Second Chapter, and judge whether they seem to be the public acts of the same power, and observe whether other oaths are tendered to them, and under what penalties. Compare the former with the same laws, from the beginning to the end, and judge whether the Roman Catholics have been preserved, agreeably to the sense of the article, from any disturbance upon account of their religion,—or rather, whether on that account there is a single right of Nature or benefit of society which has not been either totally taken away or considerably impaired.

But it is said, that the legislature was not bound by this article, as it has never been ratified in Parliament. I do admit that it never had that sanction, and that the Parliament was under no obligation to ratify these articles by any express act of theirs But still I am at a loss how they came to be the less valid, on the principles of our Constitution, by being without that sanction. They certainly bound the king and his successors. The words of the article do this, or they do nothing; and so far as the crown had a share in passing those acts, the public faith was unquestionably broken. In Ireland such a breach on the part of the crown was much more unpardonable in administration than it would have been here. They have in Ireland a way of preventing any bill even from approaching the royal presence, in matters of far less importance than the honor and faith of the crown and the well-being of a great body of the people. For, besides that they might have opposed the very first suggestion of it in the House of Commons, it could not be framed into a bill without the approbation of the Council in Ireland. It could not be returned to them again without the approbation of the King and Council here. They might have met it again in its second passage through that House of Parliament in which it was originally suggested, as well as in the other. If it had escaped them through all these mazes, it was again to come before the Lord Lieutenant, who might have sunk it by a refusal of the royal assent. The Constitution of Ireland has interposed all those checks to the passing of any constitutional act, however insignificant in its own nature. But did the administration in that reign avail themselves of any one of those opportunities? They never gave the act of the eleventh of Queen Anne the least degree of opposition in any one stage of its progress. What is rather the fact, many of the queen's servants encouraged it, recommended it, were in reality the true authors of its passing in Parliament, instead of recommending and using their utmost endeavor to establish a law directly opposite in its tendency, as they were bound to do by the express letter of the very first article of the Treaty of Limerick. To say nothing further of the ministry, who in this instance most shamefully betrayed the faith of government, may it not be a matter of some degree of doubt, whether the Parliament, who do not claim a right of dissolving the force of moral obligation, did not make themselves a party in this breach of contract, by presenting a bill to the crown in direct violation of those articles so solemnly and so recently executed, which by the Constitution they had full authority to execute?

It may be further objected, that, when the Irish requested the ratification of Parliament to those articles, they did, in effect, themselves entertain a doubt concerning their validity without such a ratification. To this I answer, that the collateral security was meant to bind the crown, and to hold it firm to its engagements. They did not, therefore, call it a perfecting of the security, but an additional security, which it could not have been, if the first had been void; for the Parliament could not bind itself more than the crown had bound itself. And if all had made but one security, neither of them could be called additional with propriety or common sense. But let us suppose that they did apprehend there might have been something wanting in this security without the sanction of Parliament. They were, however, evidently mistaken; and this surplusage of theirs did not weaken the validity of the single contract, upon the known principle of law, Non solent, quae abundant, vitiare scripturas. For nothing is more evident than that the crown was bound, and that no act can be made without the royal assent. But the Constitution will warrant us in going a great deal further, and in affirming, that a treaty executed by the crown, and contradictory of no preceding law, is full as binding on the whole body of the nation as if it had twenty times received the sanction of Parliament; because the very same Constitution which has given to the Houses of Parliament their definite authority has also left in the crown the trust of making peace, as a consequence, and much the best consequence, of the prerogative of making war. If the peace was ill made, my Lord Galmoy, Coningsby, and Porter, who signed it, were responsible; because they were subject to the community. But its own contracts are not subject to it: it is subject to them; and the compact of the king acting constitutionally was the compact of the nation.

Observe what monstrous consequences would result from a contrary position. A foreign enemy has entered, or a strong domestic one has arisen in the nation. In such events the circumstances may be, and often have been, such that a Parliament cannot sit. This was precisely the case in that rebellion in Ireland. It will be admitted also, that their power may be so great as to make it very prudent to treat with them, in order to save effusion of blood, perhaps to save the nation. Now could such a treaty be at all made, if your enemies, or rebels, were fully persuaded, that, in these times of confusion, there was no authority in the state which could hold out to them an inviolable pledge for their future security, but that there lurked in the Constitution a dormant, but irresistible power, who would not think itself bound by the ordinary subsisting and contracting authority, but might rescind its acts and obligations at pleasure? This would be a doctrine made to perpetuate and exasperate war; and on that principle it directly impugns the law of nations, which is built upon this principle, that war should be softened as much as possible, and that it should cease as soon as possible, between contending parties and communities. The king has a power to pardon individuals. If the king holds out his faith to a robber, to come in on a promise of pardon, of life and estate, and, in all respects, of a full indemnity, shall the Parliament say that he must nevertheless be executed, that his estate must be forfeited, or that he shall be abridged of any of the privileges which he before held as a subject? Nobody will affirm it. In such a case, the breach of faith would not only be on the part of the king who assented to such an act, but on the part of the Parliament who made it. As the king represents the whole contracting capacity of the nation, so far as his prerogative (unlimited, as I said before, by any precedent law) can extend, he acts as the national procurator on all such occasions. What is true of a robber is true of a rebel; and what is true of one robber or rebel is as true, and it is a much more important truth, of one hundred thousand.

To urge this part of the argument further is, indeed, I fear, not necessary, for two reasons: first, that it seems tolerably evident in itself; and next, that there is but too much ground to apprehend that the actual ratification of Parliament would, in the then temper of parties, have proved but a very slight and trivial security. Of this there is a very strong example in the history of those very articles: for, though the Parliament omitted in the reign of King William to ratify the first and most general of them, they did actually confirm the second and more limited, that which related to the security of the inhabitants of those five counties which were in arms when the treaty was made.



CHAPTER IV.

In the foregoing book we considered these laws in a very simple point of view, and in a very general one,—merely as a system of hardship imposed on the body of the community; and from thence, and from some other arguments, inferred the general injustice of such a procedure. In this we shall be obliged to be more minute; and the matter will become more complex as we undertake to demonstrate the mischievous and impolitic consequences which the particular mode of this oppressive system, and the instruments which it employs, operating, as we said, on this extensive object, produce on the national prosperity, quiet, and security.

The stock of materials by which any nation is rendered flourishing and prosperous are its industry, its knowledge or skill, its morals, its execution of justice, its courage, and the national union in directing these powers to one point, and making them all centre in the public benefit. Other than these, I do not know and scarcely can conceive any means by which a community may flourish.

If we show that these penal laws of Ireland destroy not one only, but every one, of these materials of public prosperity, it will not be difficult to perceive that Great Britain, whilst they subsist, never can draw from that country all the advantages to which the bounty of Nature has entitled it.

To begin with the first great instrument of national happiness and strength, its industry: I must observe, that, although these penal laws do, indeed, inflict many hardships on those who are obnoxious to them, yet their chief, their most extensive, and most certain operation is upon property. Those civil constitutions which promote industry are such as facilitate the acquisition, secure the holding, enable the fixing, and suffer the alienation of property. Every law which obstructs it in any part of this distribution is, in proportion to the force and extent of the obstruction, a discouragement to industry. For a law against property is a law against industry,—the latter having always the former, and nothing else, for its object. Now as to the acquisition of landed property, which is the foundation and support of all the other kinds, the laws have disabled three fourths of the inhabitants of Ireland from acquiring any estate of inheritance for life or years, or any charge whatsoever on which two thirds of the improved yearly value is not reserved for thirty years.

This confinement of landed property to one set of hands, and preventing its free circulation through the community, is a most leading article of ill policy; because it is one of the most capital discouragements to all that industry which may be employed on the lasting improvement of the soil, or is any way conversant about land. A tenure of thirty years is evidently no tenure upon which to build, to plant, to raise inclosures, to change the nature of the ground, to make any new experiment which might improve agriculture, or to do anything more than what may answer the immediate and momentary calls of rent to the landlord, and leave subsistence to the tenant and his family. The desire of acquisition is always a passion of long views. Confine a man to momentary possession, and you at once cut off that laudable avarice which every wise state has cherished as one of the first principles of its greatness. Allow a man but a temporary possession, lay it down as a maxim that he never can have any other, and you immediately and infallibly turn him to temporary enjoyments: and these enjoyments are never the pleasures of labor and free industry, whose quality it is to famish the present hours and squander all upon prospect and futurity; they are, on the contrary, those of a thoughtless, loitering, and dissipated life. The people must be inevitably disposed to such pernicious habits, merely from the short duration of their tenure which the law has allowed. But it is not enough that industry is checked by the confinement of its views; it is further discouraged by the limitation of its own direct object, profit. This is a regulation extremely worthy of our attention, as it is not a consequential, but a direct discouragement to melioration,—as directly as if the law had said in express terms, "Thou shalt not improve."

But we have an additional argument to demonstrate the ill policy of denying the occupiers of land any solid property in it. Ireland is a country wholly unplanted. The farms have neither dwelling-houses nor good offices; nor are the lands, almost anywhere, provided with fences and communications: in a word, in a very unimproved state. The land-owner there never takes upon him, as it is usual in this kingdom, to supply all these conveniences, and to set down his tenant in what may be called a completely furnished farm. If the tenant will not do it, it is never done. This circumstance shows how miserably and peculiarly impolitic it has been in Ireland to tie down the body of the tenantry to short and unprofitable tenures. A finished and furnished house will be taken for any term, however short: if the repair lies on the owner, the shorter the better. But no one will take one not only unfurnished, but half built, but upon a term which, on calculation, will answer with profit all his charges. It is on this principle that the Romans established their emphyteusis, or fee-farm. For though they extended the ordinary term of their location only to nine years, yet they encouraged a more permanent letting to farm with the condition of improvement, as well as of annual payment, on the part of the tenant, where the land had lain rough and neglected,—and therefore invented this species of engrafted holding, in the later times, when property came to be worse distributed by falling into a few hands.

This denial of landed property to the gross of the people has this further evil effect in preventing the improvement of land, that it prevents any of the property acquired in trade to be regorged, as it were, upon the land. They must have observed very little, who have not remarked the bold and liberal spirit of improvement which persons bred to trade have often exerted on their land-purchases: that they usually come to them with a more abundant command of ready money than most landed men possess; and that they have in general a much better idea, by long habits of calculative dealings, of the propriety of expending in order to acquire. Besides, such men often bring their spirit of commerce into their estates with them, and make manufactures take a root, where the mere landed gentry had perhaps no capital, perhaps no inclination, and, most frequently, not sufficient knowledge, to effect anything of the kind. By these means, what beautiful and useful spots have there not been made about trading and manufacturing towns, and how has agriculture had reason to bless that happy alliance with commerce! and how miserable must that nation be, whose frame of polity has disjoined the landing and the trading interests!

* * * * *

The great prop of this whole system is not pretended to be its justice or its utility, but the supposed danger to the state, which gave rise to it originally, and which, they apprehend, would return, if this system were overturned. Whilst, say they, the Papists of this kingdom were possessed of landed property, and of the influence consequent to such property, their allegiance to the crown of Great Britain was ever insecure, the public peace was ever liable to be broken, and Protestants never could be a moment secure either of their properties or of their lives. Indulgence only made them arrogant, and power daring; confidence only excited and enabled them to exert their inherent treachery; and the times which they generally selected for their most wicked and desperate rebellions were those in which they enjoyed the greatest ease and the most perfect tranquillity.

Such are the arguments that are used, both publicly and privately, in every discussion upon this point. They are generally full of passion and of error, and built upon facts which in themselves are most false. It cannot, I confess, be denied, that those miserable performances which go about under the names of Histories of Ireland do, indeed, represent those events after this manner; and they would persuade us, contrary to the known order of Nature, that indulgence and moderation in governors is the natural incitement in subjects to rebel. But there is an interior history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments, which speaks a very different language from these histories, from Temple and from Clarendon: these restore Nature to its just rights, and policy to its proper order. For they even now show to those who have been at the pains to examine them, and they may show one day to all the world, that these rebellions were not produced by toleration, but by persecution,—that they arose not from just and mild government, but from the most unparalleled oppression. These records will be far from giving the least countenance to a doctrine so repugnant to humanity and good sense as that the security of any establishment, civil or religious, can ever depend upon the misery of those who live under it, or that its danger can arise from their quiet and prosperity. God forbid that the history of this or any country should give such encouragement to the folly or vices of those who govern! If it can be shown that the great rebellions of Ireland have arisen from attempts to reduce the natives to the state to which they are now reduced, it will show that an attempt to continue them in that state will rather be disadvantageous to the public peace than any kind of security to it. These things have in some measure begun to appear already; and as far as regards the argument drawn from former rebellions, it will fall readily to the ground. But, for my part, I think the real danger to every state is, to render its subjects justly discontented; nor is there in polities or science any more effectual secret for their security than to establish in their people a firm opinion that no change can be for their advantage. It is true that bigotry and fanaticism may for a time draw great multitudes of people from a knowledge of their true and substantial interest. But upon this I have to remark three things. First, that such a temper can never become universal, or last for a long time. The principle of religion is seldom lasting; the majority of men are in no persuasion bigots; they are not willing to sacrifice, on every vain imagination that superstition or enthusiasm holds forth, or that even zeal and piety recommend, the certain possession of their temporal happiness. And if such a spirit has been at any time roused in a society, after it has had its paroxysm it commonly subsides and is quiet, and is even the weaker for the violence of its first exertion: security and ease are its mortal enemies. But, secondly, if anything can tend to revive and keep it up, it is to keep alive the passions of men by ill usage. This is enough to irritate even those who have not a spark of bigotry in their constitution to the most desperate enterprises; it certainly will inflame, darken, and render more dangerous the spirit of bigotry in those who are possessed by it. Lastly, by rooting out any sect, you are never secure against the effects of fanaticism; it may arise on the side of the most favored opinions; and many are the instances wherein the established religion of a state has grown ferocious and turned upon its keeper, and has often torn to pieces the civil establishment that had cherished it, and which it was designed to support: France,—England,—Holland.

But there may be danger of wishing a change, even where no religious motive can operate; and every enemy to such a state comes as a friend to the subject; and where other countries are under terror, they begin to hope.

This argument ad verecundiam has as much force as any such have. But I think it fares but very indifferently with those who make use of it; for they would get but little to be proved abettors of tyranny at the expense of putting me to an inconvenient acknowledgment. For if I were to confess that there are circumstances in which it would be better to establish such a religion....

* * * * *

With regard to the Pope's interest. This foreign chief of their religion cannot be more formidable to us than to other Protestant countries. To conquer that country for himself is a wild chimera; to encourage revolt in favor of foreign princes is an exploded idea in the politics of that court. Perhaps it would be full as dangerous to have the people under the conduct of factious pastors of their own as under a foreign ecclesiastical court.

* * * * *

In the second year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth were enacted several limitations in the acquisition or the retaining of property, which had, so far as regarded any general principles, hitherto remained untouched under all changes.

These bills met no opposition either in the Irish Parliament or in the English Council, except from private agents, who were little attended to; and they passed into laws with the highest and most general applauses, as all such things are in the beginning, not as a system of persecution, but as masterpieces of the most subtle and refined politics. And to say the truth, these laws, at first view, have rather an appearance of a plan of vexatious litigation and crooked law-chicanery than of a direct and sanguinary attack upon the rights of private conscience: because they did not affect life, at least with regard to the laity; and making the Catholic opinions rather the subject of civil regulations than of criminal prosecutions, to those who are not lawyers and read these laws they only appear to be a species of jargon. For the execution of criminal law has always a certain appearance of violence. Being exercised directly on the persons of the supposed offenders, and commonly executed in the face of the public, such executions are apt to excite sentiments of pity for the sufferers, and indignation against those who are employed in such cruelties,—being seen as single acts of cruelty, rather than as ill general principles of government. But the operation of the laws in question being such as common feeling brings home to every man's bosom, they operate in a sort of comparative silence and obscurity; and though their cruelty is exceedingly great, it is never seen in a single exertion, and always escapes commiseration, being scarce known, except to those who view them in a general, which is always a cold and phlegmatic light. The first of these laws being made with so general a satisfaction, as the chief governors found that such things were extremely acceptable to the leading people in that country, they were willing enough to gratify them with the ruin of their fellow-citizens; they were not sorry to divert their attention from other inquiries, and to keep them fixed to this, as if this had been the only real object of their national politics; and for many years there was no speech from the throne which did not with great appearance of seriousness recommend the passing of such laws, and scarce a session went over without in effect passing some of them, until they have by degrees grown to be the most considerable head in the Irish statute-book. At the same time giving a temporary and occasional mitigation to the severity of some of the harshest of those laws, they appeared in some sort the protectors of those whom they were in reality destroying by the establishment of general constitutions against them. At length, however, the policy of this expedient is worn out; the passions of men are cooled; those laws begin to disclose themselves, and to produce effects very different from those which were promised in making them: for crooked counsels are ever unwise; and nothing can be more absurd and dangerous than to tamper with the natural foundations of society, in hopes of keeping it up by certain contrivances.

* * * * *



A

LETTER

TO

WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ.,

ON THE SUBJECT OF

CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.

JANUARY 29, 1795.

LETTER.[23]

My Dear sir,—Your letter is, to myself, infinitely obliging: with regard to you, I can find no fault with it, except that of a tone of humility and disqualification, which neither your rank, nor the place you are in, nor the profession you belong to, nor your very extraordinary learning and talents, will in propriety demand or perhaps admit. These dispositions will be still less proper, if you should feel them in the extent your modesty leads you to express them. You have certainly given by far too strong a proof of self-diffidence by asking the opinion of a man circumstanced as I am, on the important subject of your letter. You are far more capable of forming just conceptions upon it than I can be. However, since you are pleased to command me to lay before you my thoughts, as materials upon which your better judgment may operate, I shall obey you, and submit them, with great deference, to your melioration or rejection.

But first permit me to put myself in the right. I owe you an answer to your former letter. It did not desire one, but it deserved it. If not for an answer, it called for an acknowledgment. It was a new favor; and, indeed, I should be worse than insensible, if I did not consider the honors you have heaped upon me with no sparing hand with becoming gratitude. But your letter arrived to me at a time when the closing of my long and last business in life, a business extremely complex, and full of difficulties and vexations of all sorts, occupied me in a manner which those who have not seen the interior as well as exterior of it cannot easily imagine. I confess that in the crisis of that rude conflict I neglected many things that well deserved my best attention,—none that deserved it better, or have caused me more regret in the neglect, than your letter. The instant that business was over, and the House had passed its judgment on the conduct of the managers, I lost no time to execute what for years I had resolved on: it was, to quit my public station, and to seek that tranquillity, in my very advanced age, to which, after a very tempestuous life, I thought myself entitled. But God has thought fit (and I unfeignedly acknowledge His justice) to dispose of things otherwise. So heavy a calamity has fallen upon me as to disable me for business and to disqualify me for repose. The existence I have I do not know that I can call life. Accordingly, I do not meddle with any one measure of government, though, for what reasons I know not, you seem to suppose me deeply in the secret of affairs. I only know, so far as your side of the water is concerned, that your present excellent Lord Lieutenant (the best man in every relation that I have ever been acquainted with) has perfectly pure intentions with regard to Ireland, and of course that he wishes cordially well to those who form the great mass of its inhabitants, and who, as they are well or ill managed, must form an important part of its strength or weakness. If with regard to that great object he has carried over any ready-made system, I assure you it is perfectly unknown to me: I am very much retired from the world, and live in much ignorance. This, I hope, will form my humble apology, if I should err in the notions I entertain of the question which is soon to become the subject of your deliberations. At the same time accept it as an apology for my neglects.

You need make no apology for your attachment to the religious description you belong to. It proves (as in you it is sincere) your attachment to the great points in which the leading divisions are agreed, when the lesser, in which they differ, are so dear to you. I shall never call any religious opinions, which appear important to serious and pious minds, things of no consideration. Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity. As long as men hold charity and justice to be essential integral parts of religion, there can be little danger from a strong attachment to particular tenets in faith. This I am perfectly sure is your case; but I am not equally sure that either zeal for the tenets of faith, or the smallest degree of charity or justice, have much influenced the gentlemen who, under pretexts of zeal, have resisted the enfranchisement of their country. My dear son, who was a person of discernment, as well as clear and acute in his expressions, said, in a letter of his which I have seen, "that, in order to grace their cause, and to draw some respect to their persons, they pretend to be bigots." But here, I take it, we have not much to do with the theological tenets on the one side of the question or the other. The point itself is practically decided. That religion is owned by the state. Except in a settled maintenance, it is protected. A great deal of the rubbish, which, as a nuisance, long obstructed the way, is removed. One impediment remained longer, as a matter to justify the proscription of the body of our country; after the rest had been abandoned as untenable ground. But the business of the Pope (that mixed person of polities and religion) has long ceased to be a bugbear: for some time past he has ceased to be even a colorable pretext. This was well known, when the Catholics of these kingdoms, for our amusement, were obliged on oath to disclaim him in his political capacity,—which implied an allowance for them to recognize him in some sort of ecclesiastical superiority. It was a compromise of the old dispute.

For my part, I confess I wish that we had been less eager in this point. I don't think, indeed, that much mischief will happen from it, if things are otherwise properly managed. Too nice an inquisition ought not to be made into opinions that are dying away of themselves. Had we lived an hundred and fifty years ago, I should have been as earnest and anxious as anybody for this sort of abjuration; but, living at the time in which I live, and obliged to speculate forward instead of backward, I must fairly say, I could well endure the existence of every sort of collateral aid which opinion might, in the now state of things, afford to authority. I must see much more danger than in my life I have seen, or than others will venture seriously to affirm that they see, in the Pope aforesaid, (though a foreign power, and with his long tail of et ceteras,) before I should be active in weakening any hold which government might think it prudent to resort to, in the management of that large part of the king's subjects. I do not choose to direct all my precautions to the part where the danger does not press, and to leave myself open and unguarded where I am not only really, but visibly attacked.

My whole politics, at present, centre in one point, and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable,—that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism. What is Jacobinism? It is an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of the persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them as a bribe the spoils of the rich. This I take to be a fair description of the principles and leading maxims of the enlightened of our day who are commonly called Jacobins.

As the grand prejudice, and that which holds all the other prejudices together, the first, last, and middle object of their hostility is religion. With that they are at inexpiable war. They make no distinction of sects. A Christian, as such, is to them an enemy. What, then, is left to a real Christian, (Christian as a believer and as a statesman,) but to make a league between all the grand divisions of that name, to protect and to cherish them all, and by no means to proscribe in any manner, more or less, any member of our common party? The divisions which formerly prevailed in the Church, with all their overdone zeal, only purified and ventilated our common faith, because there was no common enemy arrayed and embattled to take advantage of their dissensions; but now nothing but inevitable ruin will be the consequence of our quarrels. I think we may dispute, rail, persecute, and provoke the Catholics out of their prejudices; but it is not in ours they will take refuge. If anything is, one more than another, out of the power of man, it is to create a prejudice. Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.

All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell; but, humanly speaking, they are all prescriptive religions. They have all stood long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices their main stay. The people who compose the four grand divisions of Christianity have now their religion as an habit, and upon authority, and not on disputation,—as all men who have their religion derived from their parents and the fruits of education must have it, however the one more than the other may be able to reconcile his faith to his own reason or to that of other men. Depend upon it, they must all be supported, or they must all fall in the crash of a common ruin. The Catholics are the far more numerous part of the Christians in your country; and how can Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of the greater number of Christians? It is a great truth, and which in one of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any Protestant Church, can survive that event. Therefore my humble and decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of making it a blessing to the people who profess it,—that it ought to be cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. If this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject. I am the more serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion, (always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual barrier, if not the sole barrier, against Jacobinism. The Catholics form the great body of the lower ranks of your community, and no small part of those classes of the middling that come nearest to them. You know that the seduction of that part of mankind from the principles of religion, morality, subordination, and social order is the great object of the Jacobins. Let them grow lax, skeptical, careless, and indifferent with regard to religion, and, so sure as we have an existence, it is not a zealous Anglican or Scottish Church principle, but direct Jacobinism, which will enter into that breach. Two hundred years dreadfully spent in experiments to force that people to change the form of their religion have proved fruitless. You have now your choice, for full four fifths of your people, of the Catholic religion or Jacobinism. If things appear to you to stand on this alternative, I think you will not be long in making your option.

You have made, as you naturally do, a very able analysis of powers, and have separated, as the things are separable, civil from political powers. You start, too, a question, whether the civil can be secured without some share in the political. For my part, as abstract questions, I should find some difficulty in an attempt to resolve them. But as applied to the state of Ireland, to the form of our commonwealth, to the parties that divide us, and to the dispositions of the leading men in those parties, I cannot hesitate to lay before you my opinion, that, whilst any kind of discouragements and disqualifications remain on the Catholics, an handle will be made by a factious power utterly to defeat the benefits of any civil rights they may apparently possess. I need not go to very remote times for my examples. It was within the course of about a twelvemonth, that, after Parliament had been led into a step quite unparalleled in its records, after they had resisted all concession, and even hearing, with an obstinacy equal to anything that could have actuated a party domination in the second or eighth of Queen Anne, after the strange adventure of the Grand Juries, and after Parliament had listened to the sovereign pleading for the emancipation of his subjects,—it was after all this, that such a grudging and discontent was expressed as must justly have alarmed, as it did extremely alarm, the whole of the Catholic body: and I remember but one period in my whole life (I mean the savage period between 1781 and 1767) in which they have been more harshly or contumeliously treated than since the last partial enlargement. And thus I am convinced it will be, by paroxysms, as long as any stigma remains on them, and whilst they are considered as no better than half citizens. If they are kept such for any length of time, they will be made whole Jacobins. Against this grand and dreadful evil of our time (I do not love to cheat myself or others) I do not know any solid security whatsoever; but I am quite certain that what will come nearest to it is to interest as many as you can in the present order of things, religiously, civilly, politically, by all the ties and principles by which mankind are held. This is like to be effectual policy: I am sure it is honorable policy: and it is better to fail, if fail we must, in the paths of direct and manly than of low and crooked wisdom.

As to the capacity of sitting in Parliament, after all the capacities for voting, for the army, for the navy, for the professions, for civil offices, it is a dispute de lana caprina, in my poor opinion,—at least on the part of those who oppose it. In the first place, this admission to office, and this exclusion from Parliament, on the principle of an exclusion from political power, is the very reverse of the principle of the English Test Act. If I were to form a judgment from experience rather than theory, I should doubt much whether the capacity for or even the possession of a seat in Parliament did really convey much of power to be properly called political. I have sat there, with some observation, for nine-and-twenty years, or thereabouts. The power of a member of Parliament is uncertain and indirect; and if power, rather than splendor and fame, were the object, I should think that any of the principal clerks in office, to say nothing of their superiors, (several of whom are disqualified by law for seats in Parliament,) possess far more power than nine tenths of the members of the House of Commons. I might say this of men who seemed, from their fortunes, their weight in their country, and their talents, to be persons of figure there,—and persons, too, not in opposition to the prevailing party in government. But be they what they will, on a fair canvass of the several prevalent Parliamentary interests in Ireland, I cannot, out of the three hundred members of whom the Irish Parliament is composed, discover that above three, or at the utmost four, Catholics would be returned to the House of Commons. But suppose they should amount to thirty, that is, to a tenth part, (a thing I hold impossible for a long series of years, and never very likely to happen,) what is this to those who are to balance them in the one House, and the clear and settled majority in the other? For I think it absolutely impossible, that, in the course of many years, above four or five peers should be created of that communion. In fact, the exclusion of them seems to me only to mark jealousy and suspicion, and not to provide security in any way.—But I return to the old ground. The danger is not there: these are things long since done away. The grand controversy is no longer between you and them.

Forgive this length. My pen has insensibly run on. You are yourself to blame, if you are much fatigued. I congratulate you on the auspicious opening of your session. Surely Great Britain and Ireland ought to join in wreathing a never-fading garland for the head of Grattan. Adieu, my dear Sir. Good nights to you!—I never can have any.

Yours always most sincerely,

EDMUND BURKE.

Jan. 29th, 1795. Twelve at night.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] William Smith, Esq., to whom this Letter is addressed, was then a member of the Irish Parliament: he is now (1812) one of the Barons of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland.



SECOND LETTER

TO

SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE

ON THE

CATHOLIC QUESTION.

MAY 26, 1795.

My Dear Sir,—If I am not as early as I ought to be in my acknowledgments for your very kind letter, pray do me the justice to attribute my failure to its natural and but too real cause, a want of the most ordinary power of exertion, owing to the impressions made upon an old and infirm constitution by private misfortune and by public calamity. It is true, I make occasional efforts to rouse myself to something better,—but I soon relapse into that state of languor which must be the habit of my body and understanding to the end of my short and cheerless existence in this world.

I am sincerely grateful for your kindness in connecting the interest you take in the sentiments of an old friend with the able part you take in the service of your country. It is an instance, among many, of that happy temper which has always given a character of amenity to your virtues and a good-natured direction to your talents.

Your speech on the Catholic question I read with much satisfaction. It is solid; it is convincing; it is eloquent; and it ought, on the spot, to have produced that effect which its reason, and that contained in the other excellent speeches on the same side of the question, cannot possibly fail (though with less pleasant consequences) to produce hereafter. What a sad thing it is, that the grand instructor, Time, has not yet been able to teach the grand lesson of his own value, and that, in every question of moral and political prudence, it is the choice of the moment which renders the measure serviceable or useless, noxious or salutary!

In the Catholic question I considered only one point: Was it, at the time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the concord of the citizens? I have no difficulty in saying it was,—and as little in saying that the present concord of the citizens was worth buying, at a critical season, by granting a few capacities, which probably no one man now living is likely to be served or hurt by. When any man tells you and me, that, if these places were left in the discretion of a Protestant crown, and these memberships in the discretion of Protestant electors or patrons, we should have a Popish official system, and a Popish representation, capable of overturning the Establishment, he only insults our understandings. When any man tells this to Catholics, he insults their understandings, and he galls their feelings. It is not the question of the places and seats, it is the real hostile disposition and the pretended fears, that leave stings in the minds of the people. I really thought that in the total of the late circumstances, with regard to persons, to things, to principles, and to measures, was to be found a conjuncture favorable to the introduction and to the perpetuation of a general harmony, producing a general strength, which to that hour Ireland was never so happy as to enjoy. My sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that terrible disappointment to the same patience in which I have been obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other great, just, and honorable causes in which I have had some share, and which have given more of dignity than of peace and advantage to a long, laborious life. Though, perhaps, a want of success might be urged as a reason for making me doubt of the justice of the part I have taken, yet, until I have other lights than one side of the debate has furnished me, I must see things, and feel them too, as I see and feel them. I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendency, as they affect Ireland,—or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia,—or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. But it readily combines with the others, and flows from them. Whatever breeds discontent at this time will produce that great master-mischief most infallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion that their interest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained to Jacobinism. Whatever tends to irritate the talents of a country, which have at all times, and at these particularly, a mighty influence on the public mind, is of infinite service to that formidable cause. Unless where Heaven has mingled uncommon ingredients of virtue in the composition,—quos meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan,—talents naturally gravitate to Jacobinism. Whatever ill-humors are afloat in the state, they will be sure to discharge themselves in a mingled torrent in the Cloaca Maxima of Jacobinism. Therefore people ought well to look about them. First, the physicians are to take care that they do nothing to irritate this epidemical distemper. It is a foolish thing to have the better of the patient in a dispute. The complaint or its cause ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor. They ought to be the ultima, not the prima, not the tota ratio of a wise government. God forbid, that, on a worthy occasion, authority should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it! But where a prudent and enlarged policy does not precede it, and attend it too, where the hearts of the better sort of people do not go with the hands of the soldiery, you may call your Constitution what you will, in effect it will consist of three parts, (orders, if you please,) cavalry, infantry, and artillery,—and of nothing else or better. I agree with you in your dislike of the discourses in Francis Street: but I like as little some of those in College Green. I am even less pleased with the temper that predominated in the latter, as better things might have been expected in the regular family mansion of public discretion than, in a new and hasty assembly of unexperienced men, congregated under circumstances of no small irritation. After people have taken your tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not to be surprised, if they fall into a passion, and talk as men in a passion do, intemperately and idly.

The worst of the matter is this: you are partly leading, partly driving into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an invincible dike against that inundation. This you have a thousand mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish. You make a sad story of the Pope. O seri studiorum! It will not be difficult to get many called Catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion. Never doubt it. You have succeeded in part, and you may succeed completely. But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter yourselves that they will piously look to the head of our Church in the place of that Pope whom you make them forswear, and out of all reverence to whom you bully and rail and buffoon them. Perhaps you may succeed in the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine and usages of discipline amongst the Catholics; but what security have you, that, in the temper and on the principles on which they have made this change, they will stop at the exact sticking-places you have marked in your articles? You have no security for anything, but that they will become what are called Franco-Jacobins, and reject the whole together. No converts now will be made in a considerable number from one of our sects to the other upon a really religious principle. Controversy moves in another direction.

Next to religion, property is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext, (though Protestants might suppose it just possible for men to like good places and snug boroughs for their own merits,) but that their real view is, to strip Protestants of their property To my certain knowledge, till those Jacobin lectures were opened in the House of Commons, they never dreamt of any such thing; but now the great professors may stimulate them to inquire (on the new principles) into the foundation of that property, and of all property. If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.

A third point of Jacobin attack is on old traditionary constitutions. You are apprehensive for yours, which leans from its perpendicular, and does not stand firm on its theory. I like Parliamentary reforms as little as any man who has boroughs to sell for money, or for peerages in Ireland. But it passes my comprehension, in what manner it is that men can be reconciled to the practical merits of a constitution, the theory of which is in litigation, by being practically excluded from any of its advantages. Let us put ourselves in the place of these people, and try an experiment of the effects of such a procedure on our own minds. Unquestionably, we should be perfectly satisfied, when we were told that Houses of Parliament, instead of being places of refuge for popular liberty, were citadels for keeping us in order as a conquered people. These things play the Jacobin game to a nicety.

Indeed, my dear Sir, there is not a single particular in the Francis-Street declamations, which has not, to your and to my certain knowledge, been taught by the jealous ascendants, sometimes by doctrine, sometimes by example, always by provocation. Remember the whole of 1781 and 1782, in Parliament and out of Parliament; at this very day, and in the worst acts and designs, observe the tenor of the objections with which the College-Green orators of the ascendency reproach the Catholics. You have observed, no doubt, how much they rely on the affair of Jackson. Is it not pleasant to hear Catholics reproached for a supposed connection—with whom?—with Protestant clergymen! with Protestant gentlemen! with Mr. Jackson! with Mr. Rowan, &c, &c.! But egomet mi ignosco. Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures, not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of Papists. Indeed, all this will do, perhaps, well enough, with detachments of dismounted cavalry and fencibles from England. But let us not say to Catholics, by way of argument, that they are to be kept in a degraded state, because some of them are no better than many of us Protestants. The thing I most disliked in some of their speeches (those, I mean, of the Catholics) was what is called the spirit of liberality, so much and so diligently taught by the ascendants, by which they are made to abandon their own particular interests, and to merge them in the general discontents of the country. It gave me no pleasure to hear of the dissolution of the committee. There were in it a majority, to my knowledge, of very sober, well-intentioned men; and there were none in it but such who, if not continually goaded and irritated, might be made useful to the tranquillity of the country. It is right always to have a few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the many, both for the interests of the description, and for the general interest.

Excuse me, my dear friend, if I have a little tried your patience. You have brought this trouble on yourself, by your thinking of a man forgot, and who has no objection to be forgot, by the world. These things we discussed together four or five and thirty years ago. We were then, and at bottom ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of the whole and of every part of the penal system. You and I, and everybody, must now and then ply and bend to the occasion, and take what can be got. But very sure I am, that, whilst there remains in the law any principle whatever which can furnish to certain politicians an excuse for raising an opinion of their own importance, as necessary to keep their fellow-subjects in order, the obnoxious people will be fretted, harassed, insulted, provoked to discontent and disorder, and practically excluded from the partial advantages from which the letter of the law does not exclude them.

Adieu! my dear Sir,

And believe me very truly yours,

EDMUND BURKE.

BEACONSFIELD, May 26, 1795.



A

LETTER

TO

RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.,

ON

PROTESTANT ASCENDENCY IN IRELAND.

1793.

My dear son,—We are all again assembled in town, to finish the last, but the most laborious, of the tasks which have been imposed upon me during my Parliamentary service. We are as well as at our time of life we can expect to be. We have, indeed, some moments of anxiety about you. You are engaged in an undertaking similar in its principle to mine. You are engaged in the relief of an oppressed people. In that service you must necessarily excite the same sort of passions in those who have exercised, and who wish to continue that oppression, that I have had to struggle with in this long labor. As your father has done, you must make enemies of many of the rich, of the proud, and of the powerful. I and you began in the same way. I must confess, that, if our place was of our choice, I could wish it had been your lot to begin the career of your life with an endeavor to render some more moderate and less invidious service to the public But being engaged in a great and critical work, I have not the least hesitation about your having hitherto done your duty as becomes you. If I had not an assurance not to be shaken from the character of your mind, I should be satisfied on that point by the cry that is raised against you. If you had behaved, as they call it, discreetly, that is, faintly and treacherously, in the execution of your trust, you would have had, for a while, the good word of all sorts of men, even of many of those whose cause you had betrayed,—and whilst your favor lasted, you might have coined that false reputation into a true and solid interest to yourself. This you are well apprised of; and you do not refuse to travel that beaten road from an ignorance, but from a contempt, of the objects it leads to.

When you choose an arduous and slippery path, God forbid that any weak feelings of my declining age, which calls for soothings and supports, and which can have none but from you, should make me wish that you should abandon what you are about, or should trifle with it! In this house we submit, though with troubled minds, to that order which has connected all great duties with toils and with perils, which has conducted the road to glory through the regions of obloquy and reproach, and which will never suffer the disparaging alliance of spurious, false, and fugitive praise with genuine and permanent reputation. We know that the Power which has settled that order, and subjected you to it by placing you in the situation you are in, is able to bring you out of it with credit and with safety. His will be done! All must come right. You may open the way with pain and under reproach: others will pursue it with ease and with applause.

I am sorry to find that pride and passion, and that sort of zeal for religion which never shows any wonderful heat but when it afflicts and mortifies our neighbor, will not let the ruling description perceive that the privilege for which your clients contend is very nearly as much for the benefit of those who refuse it as those who ask it. I am not to examine into the charges that are daily made on the administration of Ireland. I am not qualified to say how much in them is cold truth, and how much rhetorical exaggeration. Allowing some foundation to the complaint, it is to no purpose that these people allege that their government is a job in its administration. I am sure it is a job in its constitution; nor is it possible a scheme of polity, which, in total exclusion of the body of the community, confines (with little or no regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favored citizens the rights which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the persons who administer in that government to prefer their own particular, but well-understood, private interest to the false and ill-calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong to. Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances. I have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force by the native vigor of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and climate that it grows in. But speaking of things in their ordinary course, in a country of monopoly there can be no patriotism. There may be a party spirit, but public spirit there can be none. As to a spirit of liberty, still less can it exist, or anything like it. A liberty made up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a liberty made up of exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four fifths, perhaps, of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes In what does such liberty differ from the description of the most shocking kind of servitude?

But it will be said, in that country some people are free. Why, this is the very description of despotism. Partial freedom is privilege and prerogative, and not liberty. Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle. It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty license of some potent individual or some predominant faction.

If anything ought to be despotic in a country, it is its government; because there is no cause of constant operation to make its yoke unequal. But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by its very essence, lean upon the prostrate description. A constitution formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor of freedom. It compels that power which ought, and often would be disposed, equally to protect the subjects, to fail in its trust, to counteract its purposes, and to become no better than the instrument of the wrongs of a faction. Some degree of influence must exist in all governments. But a government which has no interest to please the body of the people, and can neither support them nor with safety call for their support, nor is of power to sway the domineering faction, can only exist by corruption; and taught by that monopolizing party which usurps the title and qualities of the public to consider the body of the people as out of the constitution, they will consider those who are in it in the light in which they choose to consider themselves. The whole relation of government and of freedom will be a battle or a traffic.

This system, in its real nature, and under its proper appellations, is odious and unnatural, especially when a constitution is admitted which not only, as all constitutions do profess, has a regard to the good of the multitude, but in its theory makes profession of their power also. But of late this scheme of theirs has been new-christened,—honestum nomen imponitur vitio. A word has been lately struck in the mint of the Castle of Dublin; thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or City-Hall, where, having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in Parliament, and was carried back by the Speaker of the House of Commons in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence it came. The word is ascendency. It is not absolutely new. But the sense in which I have hitherto seen it used was to signify an influence obtained over the minds of some other person by love and reverence, or by superior management and dexterity. It had, therefore, to this its promotion no more than a moral, not a civil or political use. But I admit it is capable of being so applied; and if the Lord Mayor of Dublin, and the Speaker of the Irish Parliament, who recommend the preservation of the Protestant ascendency, mean to employ the word in that sense,—that is, if they understand by it the preservation of the influence of that description of gentlemen over the Catholics by means of an authority derived from their wisdom and virtue, and from an opinion they raise in that people of a pious regard and affection for their freedom and happiness,—it is impossible not to commend their adoption of so apt a term into the family of politics. It may be truly said to enrich the language. Even if the Lord Mayor and Speaker mean to insinuate that this influence is to be obtained and held by flattering their people, by managing them, by skilfully adapting themselves to the humors and passions of those whom they would govern, he must be a very untoward critic who would cavil even at this use of the word, though such cajoleries would perhaps be more prudently practised than professed. These are all meanings laudable, or at least tolerable. But when we look a little more narrowly, and compare it with the plan to which it owes its present technical application, I find it has strayed far from its original sense. It goes much further than the privilege allowed by Horace. It is more than parce detortum. This Protestant ascendency means nothing less than an influence obtained by virtue, by love, or even by artifice and seduction,—full as little an influence derived from the means by which ministers have obtained an influence which might be called, without straining, an ascendency, in public assemblies in England, that is, by a liberal distribution of places and pensions, and other graces of government. This last is wide indeed of the signification of the word. New ascendency is the old mastership. It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set of people in Ireland to consider themselves as the sole citizens in the commonwealth, and to keep a dominion over the rest by reducing them to absolute slavery under a military power, and, thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely amongst themselves.

The poor word ascendency, so soft and melodious in its sound, so lenitive and emollient in its first usage, is now employed to cover to the world the most rigid, and perhaps not the most wise, of all plans of policy. The word is large enough in its comprehension. I cannot conceive what mode of oppression in civil life, or what mode of religious persecution, may not come within the methods of preserving an ascendency. In plain old English, as they apply it, it signifies pride and dominion on the one part of the relation, and on the other subserviency and contempt,—and it signifies nothing else. The old words are as fit to be set to music as the new: but use has long since affixed to them their true signification, and they sound, as the other will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ears of mankind.

This ascendency, by being a Protestant ascendency, does not better it from the combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. If Protestant ascendency means the proscription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence. But there is a deeper evil. By the use that is so frequently made of the term, and the policy which is engrafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own upon the ground of which it persecutes other men: for the patrons of this Protestant ascendency neither do nor can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word Protestant. It is defined, as Cowley defines wit, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not the Christian religion as professed in the churches holding communion with Rome, the majority of Christians: that is all which, in the latitude of the term, is known about its signification. This makes such persecutors ten times worse than any of that description that hitherto have been known in the world. The old persecutors, whether Pagan or Christian, whether Arian or Orthodox, whether Catholics, Anglicans, or Calvinists, actually were, or at least had the decorum to pretend to be, strong dogmatists. They pretended that their religious maxims were clear and ascertained, and so useful that they were bound, for the eternal benefit of mankind, to defend or diffuse them, though by any sacrifices of the temporal good of those who were the objects of their system of experiment.

The bottom of this theory of persecution is false. It is not permitted to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions. By making men miserable in this life, they counteract one of the great ends of charity, which is, in as much as in us lies, to make men happy in every period of their existence, and most in what most depends upon us. But give to these old persecutors their mistaken principle, in their reasoning they are consistent, and in their tempers they may be even kind and good-natured. But whenever a faction would render millions of mankind miserable, some millions of the race coexistent with themselves, and many millions in their succession, without knowing or so much as pretending to ascertain the doctrines of their own school, (in which there is much of the lash and nothing of the lesson,) the errors which the persons in such a faction fall into are not those that are natural to human imbecility, nor is the least mixture of mistaken kindness to mankind an ingredient in the severities they inflict. The whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice. It is, indeed, a perfection in that kind belonging to beings of an higher order than man, and to them we ought to leave it.

This kind of persecutors without zeal, without charity, know well enough that religion, to pass by all questions of the truth or falsehood of any of its particular systems, (a matter I abandon to the theologians on all sides,) is a source of great comfort to us mortals, in this our short, but tedious journey through the world. They know, that, to enjoy this consolation, men must believe their religion upon some principle or other, whether of education, habit, theory, or authority. When men are driven from any of those principles on which they have received religion, without embracing with the same assurance and cordiality some other system, a dreadful void is left in their minds, and a terrible shook is given to their morals. They lose their guide, their comfort, their hope. None but the most cruel and hardhearted of men, who had banished all natural tenderness from their minds, such as those beings of iron, the atheists, could bring themselves to any persecution like this. Strange it is, but so it is, that men, driven by force from their habits in one mode of religion, have, by contrary habits, under the same force, often quietly settled in another. They suborn their reason to declare in favor of their necessity. Man and his conscience cannot always be at war. If the first races have not been able to make a pacification between the conscience and the convenience, their descendants come generally to submit to the violence of the laws, without violence to their minds. As things stood formerly, they possessed a positive scheme of direction and of consolation. In this men may acquiesce. The harsh methods in use with the old class of persecutors were to make converts, not apostates only. If they perversely hated other sects and factions, they loved their own inordinately. But in this Protestant persecution there is anything but benevolence at work. What do the Irish statutes? They do not make a conformity to the established religion, and to its doctrines and practices, the condition of getting out of servitude. No such thing. Let three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading, scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the education they have received, and nothing more is required of them. There is no system of folly, or impiety, or blasphemy, or atheism, into which they may not throw themselves, and which they may not profess openly, and as a system, consistently with the enjoyment of all the privileges of a free citizen in the happiest constitution in the world.

Some of the unhappy assertors of this strange scheme say they are not persecutors on account of religion. In the first place, they say what is not true. For what else do they disfranchise the people? If the man gets rid of a religion through which their malice operates, he gets rid of all their penalties and incapacities at once. They never afterwards inquire about him. I speak here of their pretexts, and not of the true spirit of the transaction, in which religious bigotry, I apprehend, has little share. Every man has his taste; but I think, if I were so miserable and undone as to be guilty of premeditated and continued violence towards any set of men, I had rather that my conduct was supposed to arise from wild conceits concerning their religious advantages than from low and ungenerous motives relative to my own selfish interest. I had rather be thought insane in my charity than rational in my malice. This much, my dear son, I have to say of this Protestant persecution,—that is, a persecution of religion itself.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words. People soon forget the meaning, but the impression and the passion remain. The word Protestant is the charm that looks up in the dungeon of servitude three millions of your people. It is not amiss to consider this spell of potency, this abracadabra, that is hung about the necks of the unhappy, not to heal, but to communicate disease. We sometimes hear of a Protestant religion, frequently of a Protestant interest. We hear of the latter the most frequently, because it has a positive meaning. The other has none. We hear of it the most frequently, because it has a word in the phrase which, well or ill understood, has animated to persecution and oppression at all times infinitely more than all the dogmas in dispute between religious factions. These are, indeed, well formed to perplex and torment the intellect, but not half so well calculated to inflame the passions and animosities of men.

I do readily admit that a great deal of the wars, seditions, and troubles of the world did formerly turn upon the contention between interests that went by the names of Protestant and Catholic. But I imagined that at this time no one was weak enough to believe, or impudent enough to pretend, that questions of Popish and Protestant opinions or interest are the things by which men are at present menaced with crusades by foreign invasion, or with seditions which shake the foundations of the state at home. It is long since all this combination of things has vanished from the view of intelligent observers. The existence of quite another system of opinions and interests is now plain to the grossest sense. Are these the questions that raise a flame in the minds of men at this day? If ever the Church and the Constitution of England should fall in these islands, (and they will fall together,) it is not Presbyterian discipline nor Popish hierarchy that will rise upon their ruins. It will not be the Church of Rome nor the Church of Scotland, not the Church of Luther nor the Church of Calvin. On the contrary, all these churches are menaced, and menaced alike. It is the new fanatical religion, now in the heat of its first ferment, of the Rights of Man, which rejects all establishments, all discipline, all ecclesiastical, and in truth all civil order, which will triumph, and which will lay prostrate your Church, which will destroy your distinctions, and which will put all your properties to auction, and disperse you over the earth. If the present establishment should fall, it is this religion which will triumph in Ireland and in England, as it has triumphed in France. This religion, which laughs at creeds and dogmas and confessions of faith, may be fomented equally amongst all descriptions and all sects,—amongst nominal Catholics, and amongst nominal Churchmen, and amongst those Dissenters who know little and care less about a presbytery, or any of its discipline, or any of its doctrine. Against this new, this growing, this exterminatory system, all these churches have a common concern to defend themselves. How the enthusiasts of this rising sect rejoice to see you of the old churches play their game, and stir and rake the cinders of animosities sunk in their ashes, in order to keep up the execution of their plan for your common ruin!

I suppress all that is in my mind about the blindness of those of our clergy who will shut their eyes to a thing which glares in such manifest day. If some wretches amongst an indigent and disorderly part of the populace raise a riot about tithes, there are of these gentlemen ready to cry out that this is an overt act of a treasonable conspiracy. Here the bulls, and the pardons, and the crusade, and the Pope, and the thunders of the Vatican are everywhere at work. There is a plot to bring in a foreign power to destroy the Church. Alas! it is not about popes, but about potatoes, that the minds of this unhappy people are agitated. It is not from the spirit of zeal, but the spirit of whiskey, that these wretches act. Is it, then, not conceived possible that a poor clown can be unwilling, after paying three pounds rent to a gentleman in a brown coat, to pay fourteen shillings to one in a black coat, for his acre of potatoes, and tumultuously to desire some modification of the charge, without being supposed to have no other motive than a frantic zeal for being thus double-taxed to another set of landholders and another set of priests? Have men no self-interest, no avarice, no repugnance to public imposts? Have they no sturdy and restive minds, no undisciplined habits? Is there nothing in the whole mob of irregular passions, which might precipitate some of the common people, in some places, to quarrel with a legal, because they feel it to be a burdensome imposition? According to these gentlemen, no offence can be committed by Papists but from zeal to their religion. To make room for the vices of Papists, they clear the house of all the vices of men. Some of the common people (not one, however, in ten thousand) commit disorders. Well! punish them as you do, and as you ought to punish them, for their violence against the just property of each individual clergyman, as each individual suffers. Support the injured rector, or the injured impropriator, in the enjoyment of the estate of which (whether on the best plan or not) the laws have put him in possession. Let the crime and the punishment stand upon their own bottom. But now we ought all of us, clergymen most particularly, to avoid assigning another cause of quarrel, in order to infuse a new source of bitterness into a dispute which personal feelings on both sides will of themselves make bitter enough, and thereby involve in it by religious descriptions men who have individually no share whatsoever in those irregular acts. Let us not make the malignant fictions of our own imaginations, heated with factious controversies, reasons for keeping men that are neither guilty nor justly suspected of crime in a servitude equally dishonorable and unsafe to religion and to the state. When men are constantly accused, but know themselves not to be guilty, they must naturally abhor their accusers. There is no character, when malignantly taken up and deliberately pursued, which more naturally excites indignation and abhorrence in mankind, especially in that part of mankind which suffers from it.

I do not pretend to take pride in an extravagant attachment to any sect. Some gentlemen in Ireland affect that sort of glory. It is to their taste. Their piety, I take it for granted, justifies the fervor of their zeal, and may palliate the excess of it. Being myself no more than a common layman, commonly informed in controversies, leading only a very common life, and having only a common citizen's interest in the Church or in the State, yet to you I will say, in justice to my own sentiments, that not one of those zealots for a Protestant interest wishes more sincerely than I do, perhaps not half so sincerely, for the support of the Established Church in both these kingdoms. It is a great link towards holding fast the connection of religion with the State, and for keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of constitution, in a close connection of opinion and affection. I wish it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary land-proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of Church and Stats, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be firmly connected. I wish it well, because it is more closely combined than any other of the church systems with the crown, which is the stay of the mixed Constitution,—because it is, as things now stand, the sole connecting political principle between the constitutions of the two independent kingdoms. I have another and infinitely a stronger reason for wishing it well: it is, that in the present time I consider it as one of the main pillars of the Christian religion itself. The body and substance of every religion I regard much more than any of the forms and dogmas of the particular sects. Its fall would leave a great void, which nothing else, of which I can form any distinct idea, might fill. I respect the Catholic hierarchy and the Presbyterian republic; but I know that the hope or the fear of establishing either of them is, in these kingdoms, equally chimerical, even if I preferred one or the other of them to the Establishment, which certainly I do not.

These are some of my reasons for wishing the support of the Church of Ireland as by law established. These reasons are founded as well on the absolute as on the relative situation of that kingdom. But is it because I love the Church, and the King, and the privileges of Parliament, that I am to be ready for any violence, or any injustice, or any absurdity, in the means of supporting any of these powers, or all of them together? Instead of prating about Protestant ascendencies, Protestant Parliaments ought, in my opinion, to think at last of becoming patriot Parliaments.

The legislature of Ireland, like all legislatures, ought to frame its laws to suit the people and the circumstances of the country, and not any longer to make it their whole business to force the nature, the temper, and the inveterate habits of a nation to a conformity to speculative systems concerning any kind of laws. Ireland has an established government, and a religion legally established, which are to be preserved. It has a people who are to be preserved too, and to be led by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that government. Ireland is a country under peculiar circumstances. The people of Ireland are a very mixed people; and the quantities of the several ingredients in the mixture are very much disproportioned to each other. Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of benevolent legislation? or are we not rather to provide for the several parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the heterogeneous nature of the mass? Would not common reason and common honesty dictate to us the policy of regulating the people, in the several descriptions of which they are composed, according to the natural ranks and classes of an orderly civil society, under a common protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favorable at once to authority and to freedom,—such as the British Constitution boasts to be, and such as it is to those who enjoy it?

You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which consequently does not answer to them any one purpose of a religious establishment. This is a state of things which no man in his senses can call perfectly happy. But it is the state of Ireland. Two hundred years of experiment show it to be unalterable. Many a fierce struggle has passed between the parties. The result is, you cannot make the people Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government. This is what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions know. To-day the question is this: Are we to make the best of this situation, which we cannot alter? The question is: Shall the condition of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burdens of two religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation,—or shall it be aggravated, by stripping the people thus loaded of everything which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as to leave them naked of every sort of right and of every name of franchise, to outlaw them from the Constitution, and to cut off (perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to property, or any other qualification, from all connection with the popular representation, of the kingdom?

As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding. Liberty is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is pretended and assumed to destroy liberty. The Catholic religion is completely free. It has no establishment,—but it is recognized, permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws. If a man is satisfied to be a slave, he may be a Papist with perfect impunity. He may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as an outlaw from the British Constitution. If the constitutional liberty of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course would be taken. The franchise would have been permitted, and the mass exterminated. But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.

So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times. Trusting wholly in their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext of the general good of the community. They say, that, if the people, under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their property. They tell us that they act only on the defensive. They inform the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of people obtain votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in spite of the influence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole, or in far the major part, of Papists; that this Popish House of Commons will instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will not be in their power to save even by entering into that Popish party themselves, because there are prior claimants to be satisfied; that, as to the House of Lords, though neither Papists nor Protestants have a share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and disinterested as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful Protestant subjects; that they will be or are to be left, without house or land, to the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation with which they are threatened; that, therefore, they cannot so much as listen to any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional policy: the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door. See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of a sufficiently long perspective!