rly civil society, under a common
protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favorable at once
to authority and to freedom,--such as the British Constitution boasts to
be, and such as it is to those who enjoy it?

You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of
the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not
the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which
consequently does not answer to _them_ any one purpose of a religious
establishment. This is a state of things which no man in his senses can
call perfectly happy. But it is the state of Ireland. Two hundred years
of experiment show it to be unalterable. Many a fierce struggle has
passed between the parties. The result is, you cannot make the people
Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government. This is
what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions
know. To-day the question is this: Are we to make the best of this
situation, which we cannot alter? The question is: Shall the condition
of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of
their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burdens of two
religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the
least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation,--or
shall it be aggravated, by stripping the people thus loaded of
everything which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as
to leave them naked of every sort of right and of every name of
franchise, to outlaw them from the Constitution, and to cut off
(perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to
property, or any other qualification, from all connection with the
popular representation, of the kingdom?

As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding. Liberty
is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is
pretended and assumed to destroy liberty. The Catholic religion is
completely free. It has no establishment,--but it is recognized,
permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws. If a man is
satisfied to be a slave, he may be a Papist with perfect impunity. He
may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as
an outlaw from the British Constitution. If the constitutional liberty
of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course
would be taken. The franchise would have been permitted,