What are your dangers which threaten the Establishment? Reduce this
declamation to a point, and let us understand what you mean. The most
ample allowance does not calculate that there would be more than twenty
members who were Roman Catholics in one house, and ten in the other, if
the Catholic emancipation were carried into effect. Do you mean that
these thirty members would bring in a bill to take away the tithes from
the Protestant, and to pay them to the Catholic clergy? Do you mean
that a Catholic general would march his army into the House of Commons,
and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr. Duigenan? or, that the
theological writers would become all of a sudden more acute or more
learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed? Do you fear
for your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the English
Constitution? Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd,
that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it. Everyone
conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic,
which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining. Whatever
you think of the Catholics, there they are--you cannot get rid of them;
your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their
grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House
of Commons, they will hold their parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin,
and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in
Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see
twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all
the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should
have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on
their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it.
Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect them? They are too
numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious
to every human being--but to that man who, instead of being a Methodist
preacher, is, for the curse of us and our children, and for the ruin of
Troy and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a legislator
and a politician.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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