der all the rights of the Protestant church at once, they
gave the Catholics the first stepping-stone for reaching everything
they might desire. It was admitted, he said, that the adherents of the
Catholic faith would struggle for ascendancy; and that this bill was to
give them the political power which would be the great instrument used
in the struggle: and how a bill which did all this would tend to the
security of the Protestant church surpassed human comprehension. The
very framers of the measure saw the absurdity and the danger which it
was employed to conceal; and they had endeavoured to obviate the danger
by a precaution which proved its existence, but was impotent to prevent
it. They had devised this remedy--that when the prime minister happened
to be a Roman Catholic, all power connected with the established church
should be vested in the hands of commissioners. But who was to appoint
the commissioners? Why the prime minister. Lord Tullamore followed in a
similar strain. Ministers, he said, had themselves given the tone on the
opposite side of the question at public meetings; they had sat at the
festive board, hearing with approbation the avowal of sentiments which
they themselves had avowed, but now disclaimed completing the picture
drawn by the poet--

"Drunk at a borough, civil at a ball.
Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall."

The measure was supported by Lord Palmerston and Sir George Murray with
much eloquence and animation; but the speech which on this occasion
claimed and deserved the greatest attention from the house was that
of Mr. Sadler, a man of distinguished abilities, who had recently
been returned to parliament for the borough of Newark, by the Duke of
Newcastle's interest. He rose, he said, to add his humble vote to that
faithful band who had resigned the countenance of those whom they had
hitherto deeply respected; who had surrendered, in the language of many,
all pretensions to common sense or general information; who are branded
as intolerants and bigots, from whom ministers had happily escaped; and,
what was still more painful to generous minds, who were ranked among
those that were as devoid of true liberality and benevolence, as of
reason and intelligence. He continued: "All these things, however, move
us not. In a cause like that of the Protestant constitution of England,
now placed for the first time since its existence in a situation of
imminent peril, an humble part