on to escape, permit me just to
touch on the objections urged against our act and our resolves, and
intended as a justification of the violence offered to both Houses.
"Parliament," they assert, "was too hasty, and they ought, in so
essential and alarming a change, to have proceeded with a far greater
degree of deliberation." The direct contrary. Parliament was too slow.
They took fourscore years to deliberate on the repeal of an act which
ought not to have survived a second session. When at length, after a
procrastination of near a century, the business was taken up, it
proceeded in the most public manner, by the ordinary stages, and as
slowly as a law so evidently right as to be resisted by none would
naturally advance. Had it been read three times in one day, we should
have shown only a becoming readiness to recognize, by protection, the
undoubted dutiful behavior of those whom we had but too long punished
for offences of presumption or conjecture. But for what end was that
bill to linger beyond the usual period of an unopposed measure? Was it
to be delayed until a rabble in Edinburgh should dictate to the Church
of England what measure of persecution was fitting for her safety? Was
it to be adjourned until a fanatical force could be collected in London,
sufficient to frighten us out of all our ideas of policy and justice?
Were we to wait for the profound lectures on the reason of state,
ecclesiastical and political, which the Protestant Association have
since condescended to read to us? Or were we, seven hundred peers and
commoners, the only persons ignorant of the ribald invectives which
occupy the place of argument in those remonstrances, which every man of
common observation had heard a thousand times over, and a thousand times
over had despised? All men had before heard what they dare to say, and
all men at this day know what they dare to do; and I trust all honest
men are equally influenced by the one and by the other.

But they tell us, that those our fellow-citizens whose chains we have a
little relaxed are enemies to liberty and our free Constitution.--Not
enemies, I presume, to their _own_ liberty. And as to the Constitution,
until we give them some share in it, I do not know on what pretence we
can examine into their opinions about a business in which they have no
interest or concern. But, after all, are we equally sure that they are
adverse to our Constitution as that our statutes are hostile and
destruct