hat the Catholics of England consist mostly of our best
manufacturers. Had the legislature chosen, instead of returning their
declarations of duty with correspondent good-will, to drive them to
despair, there is a country at their very door to which they would be
invited,--a country in all respects as good as ours, and with the finest
cities in the world ready built to receive them. And thus the bigotry of
a free country, and in an enlightened age, would have repeopled the
cities of Flanders, which, in the darkness of two hundred years ago, had
been desolated by the superstition of a cruel tyrant. Oar manufactures
were the growth of the persecutions in the Low Countries. What a
spectacle would it be to Europe, to see us at this time of day balancing
the account of tyranny with those very countries, and by our
persecutions driving back trade and manufacture, as a sort of vagabonds,
to their original settlement! But I trust we shall be saved this last of
disgraces.

So far as to the effect of the act on the interests of this nation. With
regard to the interests of mankind at large, I am sure the benefit was
very considerable. Long before this act, indeed, the spirit of
toleration began to gain ground in Europe. In Holland the third part of
the people are Catholics; they live at ease, and are a sound part of the
state. In many parts of Germany, Protestants and Papists partake the
same cities, the same councils, and even the same churches. The
unbounded liberality of the king of Prussia's conduct on this occasion
is known to all the world; and it is of a piece with the other grand
maxims of his reign. The magnanimity of the Imperial court, breaking
through the narrow principles of its predecessors, has indulged its
Protestant subjects, not only with property, with worship, with liberal
education, but with honors and trusts, both civil and military. A worthy
Protestant gentleman of this country now fills, and fills with credit,
an high office in the Austrian Netherlands. Even the Lutheran obstinacy
of Sweden has thawed at length, and opened a toleration to all
religions. I know, myself, that in France the Protestants begin to be at
rest. The army, which in that country is everything, is open to them;
and some of the military rewards and decorations which the laws deny are
supplied by others, to make the service acceptable and honorable. The
first minister of finance in that country is a Protestant. Two years'
war without a t