‘Remember,’ said he to me one day, ‘that it is rather a dangerous thing to express our political opinions in this country. I might,’ said he, in a half joking manner, ‘get heated on the subject, and spout treason; and who knows but you might lodge informations against me, that would get me exhibited in front of the gaol, as an example to my deluded countrymen, or sent to cool my heels in New South Wales. You laugh, but the time is scarcely yet gone by, when your report of my disaffection to the government would have got me elevated to the first lamp post, without either judge or jury. But to show you I place some confidence in you, I will put my neck in your power by repeating my opinion on the subject. Believe me, whatever your friend may have said to the contrary, that the rancour and hatred of Protestants and Catholics, so apparent in this country, does not lie so much in the difference of their creed, as in prejudices artfully engendered and kept alive by political and religious intrigue, aided no doubt by the ignorance of the people themselves. You are a young man, a native of a happier kingdom, and of a different persuasion, and cannot, therefore enter into the feelings of this oppressed and insulted nation; nor can those who have not felt the legalized tyranny which is practised on us form any idea of what this miserable country has suffered. Victims to political corruption on the one hand, and religious rapacity and bigotry on the other; by the one we are deprived of our rights as men and subjects, and by the other robbed of our means of subsistence, to support in luxury and idleness a church establishment of which we are not members, the clergymen of which in their own persons exercise the office of priest and judge, to whom, if we consider ourselves aggrieved by their extortions, we are obliged to appeal for redress; but this is nothing to the continual dropping torment which we are doomed to endure from our subordinate oppressors, who are to a man what are termed Protestants,—tithe proctors, excisemen, constables, pound keepers, all are Protestants, and contrive at every step to put us in mind of our political bondage; and when we are goaded on by our merciless drivers until we grow frantic, they term the writhings of tortured and insulted nature, rebellion.