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. Every
one 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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