interest; and the opinion there seems to have been
that the King had on the whole lost neither power nor popularity by his
conduct. [502]

Another question, which excited scarcely less angry feeling in
Parliament and in the country, was, about the same time, under
consideration. On the sixth of December, a Whig member of the House
of Commons obtained leave to bring in a bill for the Naturalisation of
Foreign Protestants. Plausible arguments in favour of such a bill
were not wanting. Great numbers of people, eminently industrious and
intelligent, firmly attached to our faith, and deadly enemies of our
deadly enemies, were at that time without a country. Among the Huguenots
who had fled from the tyranny of the French King were many persons of
great fame in war, in letters, in arts and in sciences; and even the
humblest refugees were intellectually and morally above the average of
the common people of any kingdom in Europe. With French Protestants
who had been driven into exile by the edicts of Lewis were now mingled
German Protestants who had been driven into exile by his arms. Vienna,
Berlin, Basle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, swarmed with honest laborious
men who had once been thriving burghers of Heidelberg or Mannheim,
or who had cultivated vineyards along the banks of the Neckar and the
Rhine. A statesman might well think that it would be at once generous
and politic to invite to the English shores and to incorporate with
the English people emigrants so unfortunate and so respectable. Their
ingenuity and their diligence could not fail to enrich any land which
should afford them an asylum; nor could it be doubted that they would
manfully defend the country of their adoption against him whose cruelty
had driven them from the country of their birth.

The first two readings passed without a division. But, on the motion
that the bill should be committed, there was a debate in which the
right of free speech was most liberally used by the opponents of the
government. It was idle, they said, to talk about the poor Huguenots or
the poor Palatines. The bill was evidently meant for the benefit, not of
French Protestants or German Protestants, but of Dutchmen, who would be
Protestants, Papists or Pagans for a guilder a head, and who would, no
doubt, be as ready to sign the Declaration against Transubstantiation
in England as to trample on the Cross in Japan. They would come over in
multitudes. They would swarm in every public o