That to give way to this spirit, would invite persecution against the Presbyterians. For him, he acted on the principles on which he had been bred, had lived, and would die. The Chancellor replied to him with temper, and defended the measure of a free government giving way. That the longer Bills of Naturalization existed, the more difficult they grow to repeal, as they have been hanging out invitation to Foreigners to accept the advantages of them: was earnest against any thought of repealing the Plantation Act, which had subsisted thirteen years, and allows seven years for settling: that as Jews are chiefly concerned in remittances, it would undo our colonies to repeal Bills made in favour of that people. On the 21st, the Duke of Bedford said he had been against the Bill, and was now against the repeal, which was an effect of the imbecility of the Administration. Lord Temple again spoke against it, and well. Lord Granville with humour turned the whole into ridicule; said he remembered many religious Bills in which religion had nothing to do; they were made or repealed from clamour. When the Schism Bill passed, Lord Harcourt, then _not_ Chancellor was for it; afterwards against it, and then pleaded, that it was only a Bill to make school-mistresses take the Sacrament three times a year, and what was that to Government? The Uniformity Bill was rejected after being carried so high by party, that it was not regarded whether a man was for peace or for war, but whether he was for or against that Bill. That it had been afterwards brought in by the Whigs to gain a single Lord, Lord Nottingham; that when it was objected that a persecuting Bill was surely paying dear for one man, a grave Whig Lord replied, “It is true; but let our friends be persecuted sometimes, or they will not think they want us.” That undictated by religion as those Bills were, or the clamour against them, they breathed the very essence of it, compared to this Jew Bill, which, with its clamour, was the nothingness of a nothing. Lord Temple commended the Bench, but feared there might be Toryism lurking in some corner of it; and then painted the Bishop of London, who, he said, he had heard, was disposed to a repeal even of the Plantation Act. He would not suffer Jews even in that diocese[236] of his--he did not know whether he ought strictly to call it his diocese: the Plantations were subjected to his Lordship’s pastoral jurisdiction; but perhaps he had not taken out his patent; it might cost fourscore or an hundred pounds! He talked again of disaffection, and said he had been raking into the London Evening Post, that Augæan stable of filth and calumny--thus was Lord Temple at once a zealous Whig, and scandalized at libels! Whigs have not generally disliked libels, nor had he, but it was when he was less Whig. The Bishop of Oxford answered for his brother of London, and denied that he was averse to the Plantation Act. The Chancellor said, that the only imbecility of