any of those liberties which we admit to be sober and rational. It is known, I believe, that the greater as well as the sounder part of our excluded countrymen have not adopted the wild ideas and wilder engagements which have been held out to them, but have rather chosen to hope small and safe concessions from the legal power than boundless objects from trouble and confusion. This mode of action seems to me to mark men of sobriety, and to distinguish them from those who are intemperate, from circumstance or from nature. But why do they not instantly disclaim and disavow those who make such advances to them? In this, too, in my opinion, they show themselves no less sober and circumspect. In the present moment nothing short of insanity could induce them to take such a step. Pray consider the circumstances. Disclaim, says somebody, all union with the Dissenters;--right.--But when this your injunction is obeyed, shall I obtain the object which I solicit from _you_?--Oh, no, nothing at all like it!--But, in punishing us, by an exclusion from the Constitution through the great gate, for having been invited to enter into it by a postern, will you punish by deprivation of their privileges, or mulet in any other way, those who have tempted us?--Far from it;--we mean to preserve all _their_ liberties and immunities, as _our_ life-blood. We mean to cultivate _them_, as brethren whom we love and respect;--with _you_ we have no fellowship. We can bear with patience their enmity to ourselves; but their friendship with you we will not endure. But mark it well! All our quarrels with _them_ are always to be revenged upon _you_. Formerly, it is notorious that we should have resented with the highest indignation your presuming to show any ill-will to them. You must not suffer them, now, to show any good-will to you. Know--and take it once for all--that it is, and ever has been, and ever will be, a fundamental maxim in our politics, that you are not to have any part or shadow or name of interest whatever in our state; that we look upon you as under an irreversible outlawry from our Constitution,--as perpetual and unalliable aliens. Such, my dear Sir, is the plain nature of the argument drawn from the Revolution maxims, enforced by a supposed disposition in the Catholics to unite with the Dissenters. Such it is, though it were clothed in never such bland and civil forms, and wrapped up, as a poet says, in a thousand "artful folds of sacred lawn." For my own part, I do not know in what manner to shape such arguments, so as to obtain admission for them into a rational understanding. Everything of this kind is to be reduced at last to threats of power. I cannot say, _Væ victis_! and then throw the sword into the scale. I have no sword; and if I had, in this case, most certainly, I would not use it as a makeweight in political reasoning.