would be open to feed the English; and when the Judges, sitting on that very Bench on which he himself had sitten for twenty years, would (as in the case of last year of the complaints against Magistrates at NORTHALLERTON) declare that BREAD AND WATER were the general food of working people in England? What would he have said? Why, if he had been told, that there was to be a "REFORMATION," accompanied by a total devastation of Church and Poor property, upheld by wars, creating an enormous Debt and enormous taxes, and requiring a constantly standing army; if he had been told this, he would have foreseen our present state, and would have wept for his country; but, if he had, in addition, been told, that, even in the midst of all this suffering, we should still have the ingratitude and the baseness to cry "_No Popery_," and the injustice and the cruelty to persecute those Englishmen and Irishmen, who adhered to the faith of their pious, moral, brave, free and happy fathers, he would have said, "God's will be done: let them suffer."--But, it may be said, that it was not, then, the _Catholic Church_, but the _Laws_, that made the English so happy; for, the French had that Church as well as the English. Aye! But, in England, the Church was the very _basis of the laws_. The very first clause of MAGNA CHARTA provided for the stability of its property and rights. _A provision for the indigent_, an effectual provision, was made _by the laws_ that related to the Church and its property; and this was not the case in France; and never was the case in any country but this: so that the English people lost more by a "Reformation" than any other people could have lost.--Fortescue's authority would, of itself, be enough; but, I am not to stop with it. WHITE, the late Rector of SELBOURNE, in Hampshire, gives, in his History of that once-famous village, an extract from a record, stating that for disorderly conduct, men were _punished_ by being "compelled to _fast_ a fortnight on _bread and beer_!" This was about the year 1380, in the reign of RICHARD II. Oh! miserable "_dark ages_!" This fact _must be true_. WHITE had no purpose to answer. His mention of the fact, or rather his transcript from the record, is purely _incidental_; and trifling as the fact is, it is conclusive as to the general mode of living in those happy days. Go, tell the harnessed gravel-drawers, in Hampshire, to cry "_No Popery_;" for, that, if the Pope be not put down, he may, in time, compel them to _fast_ on _bread and beer_, instead of suffering them to continue to regale themselves on nice potatoes and pure water.--But, let us come to _Acts of Parliament_, and, first, to the Act above mentioned of KING EDWARD III. That Act fixes the _price of meat_. After naming the four sorts of meat, _beef_, _pork_, _mutton_, and _veal_, the preamble has these words: "These being THE FOOD OF THE POORER SORT." This is conclusive. It is an _incidental_ mention of a fact. It is an Act of Parliament.