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 Thermopyla. 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
James I.

..... .....

Charles I. and

Commonwealth
Charles II.

Total

59

204

25

}

23

8

319

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.

The uncandid excuse for all this is, that the greater part of these men were put to death for political, not for religious crimes. That is, a law is first passed, making it high treason for a priest to exercise his function in England, and so when he is caught and burnt, this is not religious persecution, but an offence against the state. We are, I hope, all too busy to need any answer to such childish, uncandid reasoning as this.

The total number of those who suffered capitally in the reign of Elizabeth, is stated by Dodd, in his Church History,' to be one hundred and ninety-nine; farther inquiries by Milner made their number to be two hundred and four: fifteen of these were condemned for denying the queen's supremacy; one hundred and twenty-six for the exercise of priestly functions, and the others for being reconciled to the Catholic faith, or for aiding and assisting priests. In this list, no person is included who was executed for any plot, real or imaginary, except eleven, who suffered for the pretended plot of Rheims; a plot which, Dr. Milner justly observes, was so daring a forgery, that even Camden allows the sufferers to have been political victims. Besides these, mention is made in the same work, of ninety Catholic priests, or laymen, who died in prison in the same reign. "About the same time," he says, "I find fifty gentlemen lying prisoners in York Castle; most of them perished there, of vermin, famine, hunger, thirst, damp, dirt, fever, whipping, and broken hearts, the inseparable circumstances of prisons in those days. These were every week, for a twelvemonth together, dragged by main force to hear the established service performed in the castle chapel." The Catholics were frequently, during the reign of Elizabeth, tortured in the most dreadful manner. In order to extort answers from father Campian, he was laid on the rack, and his limbs stretched a little, to show him, as the executioner termed it, what the rack was. He persisted in his refusal; then for several days successively, the torture was increased, and on the last two occasions, he was so cruelly rent and torn, that he expected to expire under the torment. While under the rack, he called continually on God. In the reign of the Protestant Edward VI. Joan Knell was burnt to death, and the year after, George Parry was burnt also. In 1575, two Protestants, Peterson and Turwort (as before stated), were burnt to death by Elizabeth. In 1589, under the same queen, Lewes, a

1 The total number of sufferers in the reign of queen Mary varies, I believe, from 200 in the Catholic to 280 in the Protestant accounts. I recommend all young men who wish to form some notion of what answer the Catholics have to make, to read Milner's Letters to a Prebendary,' and to follow the line of reading to which his references lead. They will then learn the importance of that sacred maxim, Audi alteram partem.

Protestant, was burnt to death at Norwich, where Francis Kett was also burnt for religious opinions in 1589, under the same great queen who, in 1591, hanged the Protestant Hacket for heresy, in Cheapside, and put to death Greenwood, Barrow, and Penry, for being Brownists. Southwell, a Catholic, was racked ten times during the reign of this sister of bloody queen Mary. In 1592, Mrs. Ward was hanged, drawn, and quartered, for assisting a Catholic priest to escape in a box. Mrs. Lyne suffered the same punishment for harboring a priest; and in 1586, Mrs. Clitheroe, who was accused of relieving a priest, and refused to plead, was pressed to death in York Castle; a sharp stone being placed underneath her back.

Have not Protestants persecuted both Catholics and their fellow Protestants in Germany, Switzerland, Geneva, France, Holland, Sweden, and England? Look to the atrocious punishment of Leighton under Laud, for writing against prelacy; first, his ear was cut off, then his nose slit; then the other ear cut off, then whipped, then whipped again. Look to the horrible cruelties exercised by the Protestant Episcopalians on the Scottish Presbyterians, in the reign of Charles II. of whom 8000 are said to have perished in that persecution. Persecutions of Protestants by Protestants are amply detailed by Chandler, in his History of Persecution; by Neale, in his History of the Puritans: by Laing, in his History of Scotland; by Penn, in his Life of Fox; and in Brandt's History of the Reformation in the Low Countries; which furnishes many very terrible cases of the sufferings of the Anabaptists and Remonstrants. In 1560, the parliament of Scotland decreed, at one and the same time, the establishment of Calvinism, and the punishment of death against the ancient religion: "With such indecent haste (says Robertson) did the very persons who had just escaped ecclesiastical tyranny, proceed to imitate their example." Nothing can be so absurd as to suppose, that in barbarous ages, the excesses were all committed by one religious party, and none by the other. The Huguenots of France burnt churches, and hung priests wherever they found them. Froumenteau, one of their own writers, confesses, that in the single province of Dauphiny, they killed two hundred and twenty priests, and one hundred and twelve friars. In the Low Countries, wherever Vandemerk and Sonoi, lieutenants of the Prince of Orange, carried their arms, they uniformly put to death, and in cold blood, all the priests and religious they could lay their hands on. The Protestant Servetus was put to death by the Protestants of Geneva, for denying the doctrine of the Trinity, as the Protestant Gentilis was, on the same score, by those of Berne; add to these, Felix Mans, Rotman, and Barnevald. Of Servetus, Melancthon, the mildest of men, declared that he de