In the year 1778 Sir George Savile earned for himself an honorable distinction by passing his measure for the relief of Roman Catholics. Sir George Savile was a man of advanced views; he fought gallantly in the House of Commons through five successive Parliaments, in which he represented York County, for all measures which he believed to be sincerely patriotic, and against all measures which he believed to be opposed to the honorable interests of his country. He gained the laurel of praise from Burke, who, in one of his famous Bristol speeches, spoke of him as a true genius, "with an understanding vigorous, acute, relined, distinguishing even to excess; and illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of imagination." The man whom Burke thus generously praised deserved the praises. He strove earnestly against the American war. He enthusiastically supported Pitt's motion in 1783 for a reform in Parliament. He was the author of an admirable Bill for the Limitation of the Claims of the Crown upon Landed Estates. But his name is chiefly associated with his Bill for Catholic Relief, both because of the excellent purpose of the measure itself, and because of the remarkable outburst of fanaticism which followed it. Sir George Savile's measure did away with certain restrictions, certain barbarous restrictions, as they now seem, upon English subjects professing the Catholic faith. The famous Act of the eleventh and twelfth years of King William the Third, the Act known as the Act for the Further Preventing the Growth of Popery, had instituted certain very harsh penal enactments against Catholics. {192} That Act Sir George Savile proposed largely to repeal. This was a measure of relief of no great magnitude, but it did at least recognize the common humanity of Catholic Englishmen with Protestant Englishmen; it did at least allow to Catholic Englishmen some of the dearest and most obvious rights of citizenship. The savage penal laws which for so long afflicted the sister island of Ireland were tempered and abrogated in this measure as far as England was concerned, and rumor spread it abroad that a similar relief was soon to be extended to the Catholics of Scotland. Straightway a Bill which had passed both Houses without a single negative aroused the fiercest opposition beyond the Border. The announcement of the recall of the Stuarts could not have spread a greater panic through the ranks of the Scottish Protestants. A violent agitation was set on foot, an agitation which could not have been more violent if the Highlanders had once again been at the gates of Edinburgh. An alarmist spirit spread abroad. All manner of associations and societies were called into being for the defence of a faith which was not menaced. Committees were appointed to inflame faction and serve as the rallying points of bigotry. Sectarian books and pamphlets of the most exaggerated and alarming kind were sown broadcast all over the country.