who
believes in seven sacraments can carry a public road, or bridge, one
yard out of the direction most beneficial to the public, and that
nobody can cheat the public who does not expound the Scriptures in the
purest and most orthodox manner. This will give pleasure to Mr.
Perceval: but, from his unfairness upon these topics I appeal to the
justice and the proper feelings of Mr. Huskisson. I ask him if the
human mind can experience a more dreadful sensation than to see its
own jobs refused, and the jobs of another religion perpetually
succeeding? I ask him his opinion of a jobless faith, of a creed which
dooms a man through life to a lean and plunderless integrity. He knows
that human nature cannot and will not bear it; and if we were to paint
a political Tartarus, it would be an endless series of snug
expectations and cruel disappointments. These are a few of many
dreadful inconveniences which the Catholics of all ranks suffer from
the laws by which they are at present oppressed. Besides, look at
human nature: what is the history of all professions? Joel is to be
brought up to the bar: has Mrs. Plymley the slightest doubt of his
being Chancellor? Do not his two shrivelled aunts live in the
certainty of seeing him in that situation, and of cutting out with
their own hands his equity habiliments? And I could name a certain
minister of the Gospel who does not, in the bottom of his heart, much
differ from these opinions. Do you think that the fathers and mothers
of the holy Catholic Church are not as absurd as Protestant papas and
mammas? The probability I admit to be, in each particular case, that
the sweet little blockhead will in fact never get a brief;--but I will
venture to say there is not a parent from the Giant's Causeway to
Bantry Bay who does not conceive that his child is the unfortunate
victim of the exclusion, and that nothing short of positive law could
prevent his own dear, pre-eminent Paddy from rising to the highest
honours of the State. So with the army and parliament; in fact, few
are excluded; but, in imagination, all: you keep twenty or thirty
Catholics out, and you lose the affections of four millions; and, let
me tell you, that recent circumstances have by no means tended to
diminish in the minds of men that hope of elevation beyond their own
rank which is so congenial to our nature: from pleading for John Roe
to taxing John Bull, from jesting for Mr. Pitt and writing in the
_Anti-Jacobin_, to managi