of a common father or the
freedom of common citizens, and that the only reason which can be
assigned for this disfranchisement has a tendency more deeply to
ulcerate their minds than the act of exclusion itself. What the
consequence of such feelings must be it is for you to look to. To warn
is not to menace.

I am far from asserting that men will not excite disturbances without
just cause. I know that such an assertion is not true. But neither is it
true that disturbances have never just complaints for their origin. I am
sure that it is hardly prudent to furnish them with such causes of
complaint as every man who thinks the British Constitution a benefit may
think at least colorable and plausible.

Several are in dread of the manoeuvres of certain persons among the
Dissenters, who turn this ill humor to their own ill purposes. You know,
better than I can, how much these proceedings of certain among the
Dissenters are to be feared. You are to weigh, with the temper which is
natural to you, whether it may be for the safety of our establishment
that the Catholics should be ultimately persuaded that they have no hope
to enter into the Constitution but through the Dissenters.

Think whether this be the way to prevent or dissolve factious
combinations against the Church or the State. Reflect seriously on the
possible consequences of keeping in the heart of your country a bank of
discontent, every hour accumulating, upon which every description of
seditious men may draw at pleasure. They whose principles of faction
will dispose them to the establishment of an arbitrary monarchy will
find a nation of men who have no sort of interest in freedom, but who
will have an interest in that equality of justice or favor with which a
wise despot must view all his subjects who do not attack the foundations
of his power. Love of liberty itself may, in such men, become the means
of establishing an arbitrary domination. On the other hand, they who
wish for a democratic republic will find a set of men who have no choice
between civil servitude and the entire ruin of a mixed Constitution.

Suppose the people of Ireland divided into three parts. Of these, (I
speak within compass,) two are Catholic; of the remaining third, one
half is composed of Dissenters. There is no natural union between those
descriptions. It may be produced. If the two parts Catholic be driven
into a close confederacy with half the third part of Protestants, with a
vie