This general toleration must not be rated at too high a value. Religion was a cold and lifeless thing among the governing class, and the Wesleyan movement, which began about this time to breathe a new moral spirit into the common people, was treated by the bulk of fashionable society with extreme contempt. Toleration sprang more often from indifference than from generosity, and when the French Revolution broke out most of the Whig aristocracy deserted to the Established Church as one of the strongholds of reaction. Religion then became valuable to property. So long as it meant little, they gave it liberty. When restriction became useful to the magistrate, liberty was forgotten. It was only a small section of the Whigs that, at any particular date between 1760 and 1820, could be found steadily and conscientiously practising Liberal ideas even in religion. In the early part of that period Liberalism existed only among the body headed by Lord Rockingham, of whom Edmund Burke was the brains and the tongue. Burke thus attacked the Catholic disabilities: "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 {61} which an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule." He admits that "this may be no bad form of government," but declares that in the Irish case the indirect hardships produced by the Protestant ascendancy are more even than the indirect. "They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative cause of life; while every franchise, every honour, every trust, every place down to the very lowest and least confidential (besides whole professions) is reserved for the master cast.... If they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, a tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigour." This is pure Liberalism, perceiving that the whole man is depreciated by his political disabilities.[69] So Fox said of the Catholic claims: "Though they require only qualification for corporations, Parliament, and offices under Government, the object is of great magnitude to them. It is founded on the great principle of requiring to be placed on a footing of equality with their fellow-subjects."[70] This insight was rare, and it was confined almost entirely to matters of religion. Discussion of political and proprietary institutions was as hateful to the ordinary Whig after the Revolution as to any Tory, and even Burke always drew the line at Unitarians. This Church had been excluded from the Toleration Act of William III, and in 1792, the year in which Burke wrote his _Letter to Langrishe_, Fox introduced a Bill to put them in the same position as other Dissenters.