emen in Parliament,
looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their
party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a
wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and
ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect
them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to
be done is obvious to every human being--but to that man who, instead
of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us and our
children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good old Priam
and his sons, become a legislator and a politician.

A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble noblemen
in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political
power; whereas, there is no more distinction between these two things
than there is between him who makes the distinction and a booby. If I
strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic, and give him twenty
stripes ... I persecute; if I say, Everybody in the town where you
live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices, but
you, who are a Catholic ... I do not persecute! What barbarous
nonsense is this! as if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily
pain or as severe poverty: as if I could not be as great a tyrant by
saying, You shall not enjoy--as by saying, You shall suffer. The
English, I believe, are as truly religious as any nation in Europe: I
know no greater blessing; but it carries with it this evil in its
train, that any villain who will bawl out, '_The Church is in
danger!_' may get a place and a good pension; and that any
administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into
power who, at a moment of stationary and passive piety, would be
hooted by the very boys in the streets. But it is not all religion; it
is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive spirit which delights to
keep the common blessings of sun and air and freedom from other human
beings. 'Your religion has always been degraded; you are in the dust,
and I will take care you never rise again. I should enjoy less the
possession of an earthly good by every additional person to whom it
was extended.' You may not be aware of it yourself, most reverend
Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same
principle that Sarah your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham
or a gooseberry dumpling: she values her receipts, not because they
secure to