it for your indolence, do it for your safety--emancipate and eat, emancipate and drink--emancipate, and preserve the rent-roll and the family estate!" In conclusion he gives a word of warning first to his Roman Catholic clients, imploring them to be patient as well as firm; and then to the various sections of the "No Popery" party in England-- "_To the Base_.--Sweet children of turpitude, beware! the old antipopery people are fast perishing away. Take heed that you are not surprised by an emancipating king, or an emancipating administration. Leave a _locus poenitentiæ!_--prepare a place for retreat--get ready your equivocations and denials. The dreadful day may yet come, when liberality may lead to place and power. We understand these matters here. It is safest to be moderately base--to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when any thing is to be gained by virtue," The suggested prophecy had not long to wait for its fulfilment. In the summer of 1828, William Vesey Fitzgerald, a great landowner in County Clare, and one of the Members for that county, accepted office in the Government as President of the Board of Trade, thereby vacating his seat. Lord Beaconsfield shall tell the remainder of the story. "An Irish lawyer, a professional agitator, himself a Roman Catholic and therefore ineligible, announced himself as a candidate in opposition to the new minister, and on the day of election thirty thousand peasants, setting at defiance all the landowners of the county, returned O'Connell at the head of the poll, and placed among not the least memorable of historical events--the Clare Election."[92] This election decided the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, and the cause, for which Sydney Smith had striven so heroically, was won at last. On the 28th of August 1828 he wrote to a Roman Catholic friend:-- "Brougham thinks the Catholic question as good as carried; but I never think myself as good as carried, till my horse brings me to my stable-door.... What am I to do with my time, or you with yours, after the Catholic question is carried?" To the same friend he wrote:-- "You will be amused by hearing that I am to preach the 5th of November[93] sermon at Bristol, and to dine at the 5th of November dinner with the Mayor and Corporation of Bristol. All sorts of bad theology are preached at the Cathedral on that day, and all sorts of bad toasts drunk at the Mansion House. I will do neither the one nor the other, nor bow the knee in the house of Rimmon." On the 5th of November 1828, he wrote to Lord Holland:-- "To-day I have preached an honest sermon before the Mayor and Corporation in the Cathedral--the most Protestant Corporation in England! They stared at me with all their eyes. Several of them could not keep the turtle on their stomachs."