ical importance he
cannot expect, in a country where the representation is placed
exclusively in the hands of the Roman Catholic bishops.[37]

Mr Waller resided, and employed the labourers in his neighbourhood; but
he took a part of his own land into his own hands--he ejected tenants
who were unable or unwilling to pay their rents, and he gave them
compensation, and to such as remained employment. What of that? He dared
to occupy his own property, and for this he suffered years of
persecution. His own expenditure, and his wife's charities, were no
protection; and at length, while enjoying the comforts of his home, he
and the amiable and unoffending females of his family, were cruelly
butchered on his own hearth: and though, in the conflict, their
assailants must have been wounded and marked, they have not as yet been
discovered. May we not ask why is this? How comes it that, in a
Christian country, murder is tolerated, nay openly approved? that the
assassin is protected and concealed, instead of being delivered up, and
made amenable to the offended laws of his country?[38] Can the ministers
of that religion professed by the vast majority of the people, have
faithfully discharged their sacred obligations, if men be found,
professing the religion of Christ and understanding its precepts,
willing to enrol themselves as the hired bravoes of a "Black Sheep
Society," and to butcher their neighbours for a petty reward? The Roman
Catholic religion condemns murder as strongly as the Protestant
religion; yet how happens it, that a whole community professing that
faith winks at the crimes of the guilty? This total demoralization we
look on as the worst feature of the case. There are, and always must be,
bad men in every society; but how the great mass of the people could be
brought to tolerate the commission of crimes amongst them, which cry
aloud to Heaven for vengeance, is more than we can comprehend. Had the
priests devoted that time which they spent in exciting the passions and
misleading the judgment of their flocks, in the inculcation of the
divine precept of brotherly love--had they exercised that influence
which they undoubtedly possess in calming the passions and enlightening
the minds of their people--the condition of their country would now be
widely different from what it is; and surely their bishops might have
been better employed in remedying the neglect of their subordinates,
than in attending political meetings, an