o all the rights of subjects, all become Protestant
Dissenters, and, as the others do, take all your oaths. They would all
obtain their civil objects; and the change, for anything I know to the
contrary, (in the dark as I am about the Protestant Dissenting tenets,)
might be of use to the health of their souls. But what security our
Constitution, in Church or State, could derive from that event, I cannot
possibly discern. Depend upon it, it is as true as Nature is true, that,
if you force them out of the religion of habit, education, or opinion,
it is not to yours they will ever go. Shaken in their minds, they will
go to that where the dogmas are fewest,--where they are the most
uncertain,--where they lead them the least to a consideration of what
they have abandoned. They will go to that uniformly democratic system to
whose first movements they owed their emancipation. I recommend you
seriously to turn this in your mind. Believe that it requires your best
and maturest thoughts. Take what course you please,--union or no union;
whether the people remain Catholics or become Protestant Dissenters,
sure it is that the present state of monopoly _cannot_ continue.

If England were animated, as I think she is not, with her former spirit
of domination, and with the strong theological hatred which she once
cherished for that description of her fellow-Christians and
fellow-subjects, I am yet convinced, that, after the fullest success in
a ruinous struggle, you would be obliged to abandon that monopoly. We
were obliged to do this, even when everything promised success, in the
American business. If you should make this experiment at last, under the
pressure of any necessity, you never can do it well. But if, instead of
falling into a passion, the leading gentlemen of the country themselves
should undertake the business cheerfully, and with hearty affection
towards it, great advantages would follow. What is forced cannot be
modified: but here you may measure your concessions.

It is a consideration of great moment, that you make the desired
admission without altering the system of your representation in the
smallest degree or in any part. You may leave that deliberation of a
Parliamentary change or reform, if ever you should think fit to engage
in it, uncomplicated and unembarrassed with the other question. Whereas,
if they are mixed and confounded, as some people attempt to mix and
confound them, no one can answer for the effects on