t having operated from
the first upon the political dispositions of the old French population
by the powerful machinery of her own language, and in some cases of
her institutions. Her neglect in this instance she now feels to have
been at her own cost, and therefore politically to have been her
crime. Granting to her population a certain degree of education, and
of familiarity with the English language, certain civic privileges,
(as those of voting at political elections, of holding offices,
profitable or honorary, &c.,) under such reasonable latitude as to
time as might have made the transition easy, England would have
prevented the late wicked insurrection in Canada, and gradually have
obliterated the external monuments of French remembrances, which have
served only to nurse a senseless (because a hopeless) enmity. Now, in
Ireland, the Protestant predominance has long since trained and
moulded the channels through which flows the ordinary ambition of her
national aristocracy. The Popery of Ireland settles and roots itself
chiefly in the peasantry of three provinces. The bias of the gentry,
and of the aspiring in all ranks, is towards Protestantism. Activity
of mind and honourable ambition in every land, where the two forms of
Christianity are politically in equilibrium, move in that same line of
direction. Undoubtedly the Emancipation bill of 1829 was calculated,
or might have seemed calculated, to disturb this old order of
tendencies. But against that disturbance, and in defiance of the
unexampled liberality shown to Papists upon _every_ mode of national
competition, there is still in action (_and judging by the condition
of the Irish bar, in undiminished action_) the old spontaneous
tendency of Protestantism to 'go ahead;' the fact being that the
original independency and freedom of the Protestant principle not only
create this tendency, but also meet and favour it wherever nature has
already created it, so as to operate in the way of a perpetual bounty
upon Protestant leanings. Here, therefore, is _one_ of the great
advantages to every English government from upholding and fostering,
in all modes left open by the Emancipation bill, the Protestant
principle--viz. as a principle which is the pledge of a continual
tendency to union; since, as no prejudice can flatter itself with
seeing the twenty-one millions of our Protestant population pass over
to Popery, it remains that we encourage a tendency in the adverse
direc