of the Claims of the Crown upon Landed Estates. But his name is
chiefly associated with his Bill for Catholic Relief, both because of
the excellent purpose of the measure itself, and because of the
remarkable outburst of fanaticism which followed it.

Sir George Savile's measure did away with certain restrictions, certain
barbarous restrictions, as they now seem, upon English subjects
professing the Catholic faith. The famous Act of the eleventh and
twelfth years of King William the Third, the Act known as the Act for
the Further Preventing the Growth of Popery, had instituted certain
very harsh penal enactments against Catholics. {192} That Act Sir
George Savile proposed largely to repeal. This was a measure of relief
of no great magnitude, but it did at least recognize the common
humanity of Catholic Englishmen with Protestant Englishmen; it did at
least allow to Catholic Englishmen some of the dearest and most obvious
rights of citizenship. The savage penal laws which for so long
afflicted the sister island of Ireland were tempered and abrogated in
this measure as far as England was concerned, and rumor spread it
abroad that a similar relief was soon to be extended to the Catholics
of Scotland. Straightway a Bill which had passed both Houses without a
single negative aroused the fiercest opposition beyond the Border. The
announcement of the recall of the Stuarts could not have spread a
greater panic through the ranks of the Scottish Protestants. A violent
agitation was set on foot, an agitation which could not have been more
violent if the Highlanders had once again been at the gates of
Edinburgh. An alarmist spirit spread abroad. All manner of
associations and societies were called into being for the defence of a
faith which was not menaced. Committees were appointed to inflame
faction and serve as the rallying points of bigotry. Sectarian books
and pamphlets of the most exaggerated and alarming kind were sown
broadcast all over the country. The result of this kind of agitation
showed itself in a religious persecution, which gradually developed
into a religious war. The unfortunate Catholic residents in Edinburgh,
in Glasgow, and in other great Scottish towns found themselves suddenly
the victims of savage violence at the hands of mobs incited by the
inflammatory utterances and the inflammatory propaganda of the
Protestant committees. In the face of the disorder which a suggestion
of mercy aroused i