"'That the grant of the representative franchise would soon introduce into the British Senate such an influx of members from each side the Channel, as would, by voting together on all occasions of emergency, control your honourable house and the other estates of the realm, DICTATE TO THE MINISTERS OF THE CROWN, AND FORCE THEM INTO ANY MEASURES they pleased.'" * * * * * "LORD ELDON'S PREDICTIONS IN 1829, ON THE THIRD READING OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIEF BILL. "The following predictions of this venerable nobleman were at the time sneered at as the senile and effete expressions of a bigoted octogenarian. What a lesson has he left to those who now hold the rudder of the state in their hands!-- "'I know that, sooner or later, this bill will overturn the aristocracy and the monarchy. What I have stated is my notion of the danger to the Establishment. Have they not Roman Catholic archbishops for every Protestant archbishop--Roman Catholic deans for every Protestant dean? Did not the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics dispute against Henry VIII. in defence of the power of the Pope? and in Mary's time were not the laws affecting the Roman Catholics repealed, not by the authority of Parliament, but through the influence of the Pope's legate? And even though you suppress these Roman Catholics who utter these seditious, treasonable, abominable, and detestable speeches, others will arise who will utter speeches more treasonable, more abominable, and more detestable. No sincere Roman Catholic could or did look for less than a Roman Catholic king and a Roman Catholic parliament. Their lordships might flatter themselves that the dangers he had anticipated were visionary, and God forbid that he should say, that those who voted for the third reading of the bill will not have done so conscientiously, believing that no danger exists or can be apprehended from it. But in so voting, they had not that knowledge of the danger in which they were placing the great, the paramount interests of this Protestant state,--they had not that knowledge of its true interests and situation, which they ought to have. Those with whom we are dealing are too wary to apprise you by any indiscreet conduct of the danger to which you are exposed. When those dangers shall have arrived, I shall have been consigned to the urn, the sepulchre, and mortality; but that they will arrive, I have no more doubt than that I yet continue to exist.'"--_Bell's Life in London_, Dec. 21, 1850. [4] Sidney Smith. [5] JAMES'S _Naval History_, vol. i., Appendix. [6] See _Saxe Gotha Almanac_, 1851, p. 415, 461. [7] _Almanach de Gotha_, 1851, 466. [8] ADMIRAL BOWLES' Pamphlet, 1840--_Suggestions for the more speedy Equipment and better Manning of her Majesty's Navy_.