dispense conscientiously, and like an upright trustee and guardian of these rights which he holds for those with whom he is at variance, has he the capacity and means of doing it? How can the lord lieutenant form the least judgment of their merits, so as to discern which of the popish priests is fit to be made a bishop? It cannot be the idea is ridiculous.-He will hand them over to lord lieutenants of counties, justices of the peace, and other persons, who, for the purpose of vexing and turning to derision this miserable people, will pick out the worst and most obnoxious they can find among the clergy to set over the rest. Whoever is complained against by his brother, will be considered as persecuted: Whoever is censured by his superior, will be looked upon as oppressed: Whoever is careless in his opinions, and loose in his morals, will be called a liberal man, and will be supposed to have incurred hatred because he was not a bigot. Informers, tale-bearers, perverse and obstinate men, flatterers, who turn their back upon their flock, and court the protestant gentlemen of the country, will be the objects of preferment. And then I run no risk in foretelling, that whatever order, quiet, and morality you have in the country, will be lost. A popish clergy, who are not restrained by the most austere subordination, will become a nuisance, a real public grievance of the heaviest kind, in any country that entertains them: and instead of the great benefit which Ireland does, and has long derived from them, if they are educated without any idea of discipline and obedience, and then put under bishops, who do not owe their station to their good opinion, and whom they cannot respect, that nation will see disorders, of which, bad as things are, it has yet no idea. I do not say this, as thinking the leading men in Ireland would exercise this trust worse than others. Not at all. No man, no set of men living are fit to administer the affairs, or regulate the interior economy of a church to which they are enemies.

As to government, if I might recommend a prudent caution to them,-it would be, to innovate as little as possible, upon speculation, in establishments, from which, as they stand, they experience no material inconvenience to the repose of the country,-quieta non movere. -I could say a great deal more; but I am tired; and am afraid your lordship is tired too. I have not sat to this letter a single quarter of an hour without interruption. It has grown long, and probably contains many repetitions, from my total want of leisure to digest and consolidate my thoughts; and as to my expres→

sions, I could wish to be able, perhaps, to measure them more exactly. But my intentions are fair, and I certainly mean to offend nobody.

Thinking over this matter more maturely, I see no reason for altering my opinion in any part. The act, as far as it goes, is good undoubtedly. It amounts, I think, very nearly to a toleration, with respect to religious ceremonies; but it puts a new bolt on civil rights, and rivets it to the old one, in such a manner, that neither, I fear, will be easily loosened. What I could have wished would be, to see the civil advantages take the lead; the other of a religious toleration, I conceive would follow (in a manner) of course. From what I have observed, it is pride, arrogance, and a spirit of domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, that has caused and kept up those oppressive statutes. I am sure I have known those who have oppressed papists in their civil rights, exceedingly indulgent to them in their religious ceremonies, and who really wished them to continue Catholics, in order to furnish pretences for oppression. These persons never saw a man (by converting) escape out of their power, but with grudging and regret. I have known men, to whom I am not uncharitable in saying, (though they are dead) that they would have become papists in order to oppress protestants; if, being protestants it was in their power to oppress papists. It is injustice, and not a mistaken conscience, that has been the principle of persecution, at least as far as it has fallen under my observation. However, as I began, so I end. I do not know the map of the country. Mr. Gardiner, who conducts this great and difficult work, and those who support him, are better judges of the business than I can pretend to be, who have not set my foot in Ireland these sixteen years. I have been given to understand, that I am not considered as a friend to that country: and I know that pains have been taken to lessen the credit that I might have had there.

MY DEAR SIR,

YOUR remembrance of me, with sentiments of so much kindness, has given me the most sincere satisfaction. It perfectly agrees with the friendly and hospitable reception which my son and I received from you, some time since, when after an absence of twenty-two years, I had the happiness of embracing you, among my few surviving friends.

I really imagined that I should not again interest myself in any public business. I had, to the best of my moderate faculties, paid my club to the society, which I was born in some way or other to serve; and I thought I had a right to put on my night-gown and slippers, and wish a cheerful evening to the good company I must leave behind. But if our resolutions of vigour and exertion are so often broken or procrastinated in the execution, I think we may be excused, if we are not very punctual in fulfilling our engagements to indolence and inactivity. I have indeed no power of action; and am almost a cripple, even with regard to thinking: but you descend with force into the stagnant pool; and you cause such a fermentation, as to cure at least one impotent creature of his lameness, though it cannot enable him either to run or to wrestle.

You see by the paper* I take that I am likely to be long, with malice prepense. You have brought under my view a subject, always difficult, at present critical.It has filled my thoughts, which I wish to lay open to you with the clearness and simplicity which your friendship demands from me. I thank you for the communication of your ideas. I should be still more pleased if they had been more your own. What you hint, I believe to be the case; that if you had not deferred to the judgment of others, our opinions would not differ more materially at this day, than they The letter is written on folio sheets.

did when we used to confer on the same subject, so many years ago. If I still persevere in my old opinions, it is no small comfort to me, that it is not with regard to doctrines properly yours, that I discover my indocility.

The case upon which your letter of the 10th of December turns, is hardly before me with precision enough, to enable me to form any very certain judgment upon it. It seems to be some plan of further indulgence proposed for the Catholics of Ireland. You observe, that your "general principles are not changed, but that times and circumstances are altered." I perfectly agree with you, that times and circumstances, considered with reference to the public, ought very much to govern our conduct; though I am far from slighting, when applied with discretion to those circumstances, general principles and maxims of policy. I cannot help observing, however, that you have said rather less upon the inapplicability of your own old principles to the circumstances that are likely to influence your conduct against these principles, than of the general maxims of state, which I can very readily believe not to have great weight with you personally.

In my present state of imperfect information, you will pardon the errours into which I may easily fall. The principles you lay down are, "that the Roman Catholics should enjoy every thing under the state, but should not be the state itself." And you add, "that when you exclude them from being a part of the state, you rather conform to the spirit of the age, than to any abstract doctrine;" but you consider the constitution as already established-that our state is protestant. "It was declared so at the revolution. It was so provided in the acts for settling the succession of the crown ;-the king's coronation oath was enjoined, in order to keep it so. The king, as first magistrate of the state, is obliged to take the oath of abjura

tion, and to subscribe the declaration; and, by laws subsequent, every other magistrate and member of the state, legislative and executive, are bound under the same obligation." As to the plan to which these maxims are applied, I cannot speak, as I told you, positively about it. Besides, neither from your letter, nor from any information I have beer able to collect, do I find any thing settled, either on the part of the Roman Catholics themselves, or on that of any persons who may wish to conduct their affairs in parliament. But if I have leave to conjecture, something is in agitation towards admitting them, under certain qualifications, to have some share in the election of members of parliament. This I understand is the scheme of those who are entitled to come within your description of persons of consideration, property, and character; and firmly attached to the king and constitution, as by "law established, with a grateful sense of your former concessions, and a patient reliance on the benignity of parliament, for the further mitigation of the laws that still affect them."-As to the low, thoughtless, wild and profligate, who have joined themselves with those of other professions, but of the same character; you are not to imagine, that, for a moment, I can suppose them to be met, with any thing else than the manly and enlightened energy of a firm government, supported by the united efforts of all virtuous men, if ever their proceedings should become so considerable as to demand its notice. I really think that such associations should be crushed in their very commencement.

Setting, therefore, this case out of the question, it becomes an object of very serious consideration, whether, because wicked men of various descriptions are engaged in seditious courses, the rational, sober, and valuable part of one description should not be indulged in their sober and rational expectations? You, who have looked deeply into the spirit of the popery laws, must be perfectly sensible, that a great part of the present mischief, which we abhor in common (if it at all exists) has arisen from them. Their declared object was to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education. The professed object was to deprive the few men who, in spite of those laws, might hold or obtain any property among them, of all sort of influence or authority over the rest. They divided the nation

A small errour of fact as to the abjuration oath; but of no importance in the argument.

into two distinct bodies, without common in. terest, sympathy, or connexion. One of these bodies was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education: the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. Are we to be astonished, when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation, continued without intermission for near an hundred years, we had reduced them to a mob ; that whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure or foresight? Surely it might be just now a matter of temperate discussion, whether you ought not to apply a remedy to the real cause of the evil. If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristocratic interest; that is, an interest of property and education among them: and to strengthen by every prudent means, the authority and influence of men of that description. It will deserve your best thoughts, to examine whether this can be done without giving such persons the means of demonstrating to the rest, that something more is to be got by their temperate conduct, than can be expected from the wild and senseless projects, of those, who do not belong to their body, who have no interest in their well being, and only wish to make them the dupes of their turbulent ambition.

If the absurd persons you mention find no way of providing for liberty, but by overturning this happy constitution, and introducing a frantic democracy, let us take care how we prevent better people, from any rational expectations of partaking in the benefits of that constitution as it stands. The maxims you establish cut the matter short. They have no sort of connexion with the good or the ill behaviour of the persons who seek relief, or with the proper or improper means by which they seek it. They form a perpetual bar to all pleas and to all expectations.

You begin by asserting, that "the Catholics ought to enjoy all things under the state, but that they ought not to be the state." A position which, I believe, in the latter part of it, and in the latitude there expressed, no man of common sense has ever thought proper to dispute: because the contrary implies, that the state ought to be in them exclusively. But before you have finished the line, you express yourself as if the other member of your proposition, namely, that "they ought not to be a part of the state," were necessarily included in the first-Whereas I conceive it to be as different, as a part is from the whole; that is,

just as different as possible. I know indeed, that it is common with those who talk very differently from you, that is with heat and animosity, to confound those things, and to argue the a mission of the Catholics into any, however minute and subordinate, parts of the state, as a surrender into their hands of the whole government of the kingdom. To them I have nothing at all to say.

Wishing to proceed with a deliberative spirit and temper in so very serious a question, I shall attempt to analyze, as well as I can, the principles you lay down, in order to fit them for the grasp of an understanding so little comprehensive as mine-State Protestant Revolution.' These are terms, which, if not well explained, may lead us into many errours. In the word State, I conceive there is much ambiguity. The state is sometimes used to signify the whole commonwealth, comprehending all its orders, with the several privileges belonging to each. Sometimes it signifies only the higher and ruling part of the commonwealth; which we commonly call the Government. In the first sense, to be under the state, but not the state itself, nor any part of it, that is to be nothing at all in the commonwealth, is a situation perfectly intelligible: but to those who fill that situation, not very pleasant, when it is understood. It is a state of civil servitude by the very force of the definition. Servorum non est respublica, is a very old and a very true maxim. This servitude, which makes men subject to a state without being citizens, may be more or less tolerable from many circumstances: but these circumstances, more or less favourable, do not alter the nature of the thing. The mildness by which absolute masters exercise their dominion, leaves them masters still. We may talk a little presently of the manner in which the majority of the people of Ireland (the Catholics) are affected by this situation; which at present undoubtedly is theirs, and which you are of opinion ought so to continue for ever.

In the other sense of the word State, by which is understood the Supreme Government only, I must observe this upon the question: that to exclude whole classes of men entirely from this part of government, cannot be considered as absolute slavery. It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship; such is (with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries, in which an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule. This may be no bad mode of government; provided that the personal authority of individual nobles be kept

in due bounds, that their cabals and factions are guarded against with a severe vigilance, and that the people (who have no share in granting their own money) are subjected to but light impositions, and are otherwise treated with attention, and with indulgence to their humours and prejudices.

The republic of Venice is one of those which strictly confines all the great functions and offices, such as are truly state-functions and state-offices, to those who, by hereditary right or admission, are noble Venetians. But there are many offices, and some of them not mean nor unprofitable, (that of chancellor is one) which are reserved for the Cittadini. Of these all citizens of Venice are capable. The inhabitants of the Terra Firma, who are mere subjects of conquest, that is, as you express it, under the state, but "not a part of it," are not, however, subjects in so very rigorous a sense as not to be capable of numberless subordinate employments. It is indeed one of the advantages attending the narrow bottom of their aristocracy (narrow as compared with their acquired dominions, otherwise broad enough) that an exclusion from such employments cannot possibly be made among their subjects. There are, besides, advantages in states so constituted, by which those who are considered as of an inferior race, are indemnified for their exclusion from the government and from nobler employments. In all these countries, either by express law, or by usage more operative, the noble casts are almost universally, in their turn, excluded from commerce, manufacture, farming of land, and in general from all lucrative civil professions. The nobles have the monopoly of honour. The plebeians a monopoly of all the means of acquiring wealth. Thus some sort of a balance is formed among conditions; a sort of compensation is furnished to those, who, in a limited sense, are excluded from the government of the state.

Between the extreme of a total exclusion, to which your maxim goes, and an universal unmodified capacity, to which the fanatics pretend, there are many different degrees and stages, and a great variety of temperaments, upon which prudence may give full scope to its exertions. For you know that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature: and that almost all the former are determined on the more or less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.

In all considerations which turn upon the

question of vesting or continuing the state solely and exclusively in some one description of citizens; prudent legislators will consider, how far the general form and principles of their commonwealth render it fit to be cast into an oligarchical shape, or to remain always in it. We know that the government of Ireland (the same as the British) is not in its constitution wholly aristocratical; and, as it is not such in its form, so neither is it in its spirit. If it had been inveterately aristocratical, exclusions might be more patiently submitted to. The lot of plebeian would be the lot of all; and an habitual reverence and admiration of certain families, might make the people content to see government wholly in the hands to whom it seemed naturally to belong. But our constitution has a plebeian member, which forms an essential integrant part of it. A plebeian oligarchy is a monster: and no people, not absolutely domestic or predial slaves, will long endure it. The protestants of Ireland are not alone sufficiently the people to form a democracy; and they are too numerous to answer the ends and purposes of an aristocracy. Ad miration, that first source of obedience, can be only the claim or the imposture of a few. I hold it to be absolutely impossible for two millions of plebeians, composing certainly, a very clear and decided majority in that class, to become so far in love with six or seven hundred thousand of their fellow citizens (to all outward appearance plebeians like themselves, and many of them tradesmen, servants, and otherwise inferior to some of them) as to see with satisfaction, or oven with patience, an exclusive power vested in them, by which constitutionally they become the absolute masters; and by the manners derived from their circumstances, must be capable of exercising upon them, daily and hourly, an insulting and vexatious superiority. Neither are the majority of the Irish indemnified (as in some aristocracies) for this state of humiliating vassalage (often inverting the nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life: while every franchise, every honour, every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential (besides whole professions) is reFerved for the master cast.

Our constitution is not made for great, general or proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution. In our constitution there has always been a difference between a fran

chise and an office, and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the subject, as a subject, and not as a member of the governing part of the state. The policy of government has considered them as things very different: for whilst parliament excluded by the test acts (and for a while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in England) protestant dissenters from all civil and military employment, they never touched their right of voting for members of parliament, or sitting in either house; a point I state, not as approving or condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in

reason.

I will not here examine whether the prin ciples of the British [the Irish] constitution, be wise or not. I must assume that they are; and that those who partake the franchises which make it, partake of a benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications inherent in the constitution that gives them) are excluded, not from the state, but from the British constitution. They cannot by any possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so bravely made by those who possess the privilege-that the best blood in their veins ought to be shed, to preserve their share in it; they, the disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think themselves in a happy state, to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential advantages. The popular part of the constitution must be to them by far the most odious part of it. To them it is not an actual, and, if possible, still less a virtual representation. It is indeed the direct contrary, It is power unlimited, placed in the hands of an adverse description, because it is an adverse description. And if they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, or tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigour.

This is not a mere theory; though whilst men are men, it is a theory that cannot be false. I do not desire to revive all the particulars in my memory; I wish them to sleep for ever; but it is impossible I should wholly forget what happened in some parts of Ireland, with very few and short intermissions, from the year 1761 to the year 1766, both inclusive. In a country of miserable police, passing from