f the
French; and, Protestant Englishmen, if you have the capacity of blushing
left, blush at the thought of how precisely that picture fits the English
_now_! Look at _all the parts_ of the picture; the _food_, the _raiment_,
the _game_! Good God! If any one had told the old Chancellor, that the day
would come, when this picture, and even a picture more degrading to human
nature, would fit his own boasted country, what would he have said? What
would he have said, if he had been told, that the time was to come, when
the soldier, in England, would have more than twice, nay, more than
thrice, the sum allowed to the day-labouring man; when potatoes would be
carried to the field as the only food of the ploughman; when soup-shops
would be open to feed the English; and when the Judges, sitting on that
very Bench on which he himself had sitten for twenty years, would (as in
the case of last year of the complaints against Magistrates at
NORTHALLERTON) declare that BREAD AND WATER were the general food of
working people in England? What would he have said? Why, if he had been
told, that there was to be a "REFORMATION," accompanied by a total
devastation of Church and Poor property, upheld by wars, creating an
enormous Debt and enormous taxes, and requiring a constantly standing
army; if he had been told this, he would have foreseen our present state,
and would have wept for his country; but, if he had, in addition, been
told, that, even in the midst of all this suffering, we should still have
the ingratitude and the baseness to cry "_No Popery_," and the injustice
and the cruelty to persecute those Englishmen and Irishmen, who adhered to
the faith of their pious, moral, brave, free and happy fathers, he would
have said, "God's will be done: let them suffer."--But, it may be said,
that it was not, then, the _Catholic Church_, but the _Laws_, that made
the English so happy; for, the French had that Church as well as the
English. Aye! But, in England, the Church was the very _basis of the
laws_. The very first clause of MAGNA CHARTA provided for the stability of
its property and rights. _A provision for the indigent_, an effectual
provision, was made _by the laws_ that related to the Church and its
property; and this was not the case in France; and never was the case in
any country but this: so that the English people lost more by a
"Reformation" than any other people could have lost.--Fortescue's
authority would, of itself, be enoug