dventures which
the free and glorious spirit of the British Constitution has held out
to them, in order to secure their allegiance. In the first place, their
nobles and their gentry have been deprived of their property, and the
right of tenure has been denied even to the people. Ah, my lord, and
gentlemen of the jury, what ungrateful and disloyal miscreant could
avoid loving a Constitution, and hugging to his grateful heart laws
which showered down such blessings upon him, and upon all those who
belong to a creed so favored? But it would seem to have been felt that
these laws had still a stronger claim upon their affections. They would
protect their religion as they did their property; and in order
to attach them still more strongly, they shut up their places of
worship--they proscribed and banished and hung their clergy--they hung
or shot the unfortunate people who tied to worship God in the desert--in
mountain fastnesses and in caves, and threw their dead bodies to find
a tomb in the entrails of the birds of the air, or the dogs which even
persecution had made mad with hunger. But again--for this pleasing
panorama is not yet closed, the happy Catholics, who must have danced
with delight, under the privileges of such a Constitution, were deprived
of the right to occupy and possess all civil offices--their enterprise
was crushed--their industry made subservient to the rapacity of their
enemies, and not to their own prosperity. But this is far from being
all. The sources of knowledge--of knowledge which only can enlighten
and civilize the mind, prevent crime, and promote the progress of human
society--these sources of knowledge, I say, were sealed against
them; they were consequently left to ignorance, and its inseparable
associate--vice. All those noble principles which result from education,
and which lead youth into those moral footsteps in which they should
tread, were made criminal in the Catholic to pursue, and impossible to
attain; and having thus been reduced by ignorance to the perpetration of
those crimes which it uniformly produces--the people were punished for
that which oppressive laws had generated, and the ignorance which was
forced upon them was turned into a penalty and a persecution. They
were first made ignorant by one Act of Parliament, and then punished by
another for those crimes which ignorance produces.

"And now, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, it remains for me to
take another view of the st