mane and affecting are our efforts throughout Europe to put an end to the Slave Trade! Wherever three or four negotiators are gathered together, a British diplomate appears among them, with some article of kindness and pity for the poor negro. poor negro. All is All is mercy and compassion, except when wretched Ireland is concerned. The saint who swoons at the lashes of the Indian slave is the encourager of No Popery Meetings, and the hard, bigotted, domineering tyrant of Ireland.

See the folly of delaying to settle a question, which, in the end, must be settled, and, ere long, to the advantage of the Catholics. How the price rises by delay! This argument is extremely well put by Lord Nugent.

'I should observe that two occasions have already been lost of granting these claims, coupled with what were called securities, such as never can return. In 1808, the late Duke of Norfolk and Lord Grenville, in the one House, and Mr. Ponsonby and Mr. Grattan in the other, were authorized by the Irish Catholic body to propose a negative to be vested in the Crown upon the appointment of their bishops. Mr. Perceval, the Chancellor, and the Spiritual Bench, did not see the importance of this opportunity. It was rejected; the Irish were driven to despair; and in the same tomb with the question of 1808 lies for ever buried the Veto. The same was the fate with what were called the "wings" attached to Sir Francis Burdett's bill of last year. I voted for them, not for the sake certainly of extending the patronage of the Crown over a new body of clergy, nor yet for the sake of diminishing the popular character of elections in Ireland, but because Mr. O'Connell, and because some of the Protestant friends of the measure who knew Ireland the best, recommended them; and because I believed, from the language of some who supported it only on these conditions, that they offered the fairest chance for the measure being carried. I voted for them as the price of Catholic emancipation, for which I can scarcely contemplate any Irish price that I would not pay. With the same object, I would vote for them again; but I shall never again have the opportunity. For these also, if they were thought of any value as securities, the events of this year in Ireland have shown you that you have lost for ever. And the necessity of the great measure becomes every day more urgent and unavoidable.'-Lord Nugent's Letter, pp. 71, 72.

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Can any man living say that Ireland is not in a much more dangerous state than it was before the Catholic Convention began to exist? that the inflammatory state of that country is not becoming worse and worse? - that those men whom we call demagogues and incendiaries have not produced a very considerable, and alarming effect upon the Irish population? Where is this to end? But the fool lifteth up his voice in the coffee-house, and sayeth, 'We shall give them a hearty thrashing: let them rise- the sooner the better will soon put them down again.' The fool sayeth this in the coffee-house, and the greater fool praiseth him. But does Lord Stowel say this? does Mr. Peel say this? does the Marquis of Hertford say this? do sensible, calm, and reflecting men like these, not admit the extreme danger of combatting against invasion and disaffection, and this with our forces spread in active hostility over the whole face of the globe? Can they feel this vulgar, hectoring certainty of success, and stupidly imagine that a thing cannot be, because it has never yet been? -because we have hitherto maintained our tyranny in Ireland against all Europe, that we are always to maintain it? And then, what if the struggle does at last end in our favour? Is the loss of English lives and of English money not to be taken into account? Is this the way in which a nation overwhelmed with debt, and trembling whether its looms and ploughs will not be over-matched by the looms and ploughs of the rest of Europe is this the way in which such a country is to husband its resources? Is the best blood of the land to be flung away in a war of hassocks and surplices? Are cities to be summoned for the Thirty-nine Articles, and men to be led on to the charge by professors of divinity? The expense of keeping such a country must be added to all other enormous expenses. What is really possessed of a country so subdued? four or five yards round a sentry-box, and no more. And in twenty years' time it is all to do over again another war another rebellion, and another enormous and ruinously

of the issue! It is forgotten, too, that a new feature has arisen in the history of this country. In all former insurrections in Ireland no democratic party existed in England. The efforts of Government were left free and unimpeded. But suppose a stoppage in your manufactures coincident with a rising of the Irish Catholics, when every soldier is employed in the sacred duty of Papist-hunting. Can any man contemplate such a state of things without horror? Can any man say that he is taken by surprise for such a combination? Can any man say that any danger to Church or State is comparable to this? But for the prompt interference of the military in the early part of 1826, three or four hundred thousand starving manufacturers would have carried ruin and destruction over the north of England, and over Scotland. These dangers are inseparable from an advanced state of manufactures—but they need not the addition of other and greater perils, which need not exist in any country, too wise and too enlightened for persecution.

Where is the weak point in these plain arguments? Is it the remoteness of the chance of foreign war? Alas! we have been at war 35 minutes out of every hour since the peace of Utrecht. The state of war seems more natural to man than the state of peace; and if we turn from general probabilities to the state of Europe Greece to be liberated - Turkey to be destroyed Portugal and Spain to be made free the wounded. vanity of the French, the increasing arrogance of the Americans, and our own philopolemical folly, are endless scenes of war. We believe it is at all times a better speculation to make ploughshares into swords than swords into ploughshares. If war is certain, we believe insurrection to be quite as certain. We cannot believe but that the French or the Americans would, in case of war, make a serious attempt upon Ireland, and that all Ireland would rush, tail foremost, into insurrection.

A new source of disquietude and war has lately risen in Ireland. Our saints or evangelical people, or serious people, or by whatever other name they are to be desig

nated, have taken the field in Ireland against the Pope, and are converting in the large way. Three or four Irish Catholic prelates take a post-chaise, and curse the converters and the converted. A battle royal ensues with shillelas: the policeman comes in, and, reckless of Lambeth or the Vatican, makes no distinction between what is perpendicular, and what is hostile, but knocks down every body, and every thing which is upright; and so the feud ends for the day. We have no doubt but that these efforts will tend to bring things to a crisis much sooner between the parties, than the disgraceful conduct of the Cabinet alone would do.

It is a charge not imputed by the laws of England nor by the oaths which exclude the Catholics: for those oaths impute only spiritual errors. But it is imputed, which is more to the purpose, by those persons who approve of the excluding oaths, and wish them retained. But, to the whole of this imputation, even if no other instance could be adduced, as far as a strong and remarkable example can prove the negative of an assumption which there is not a single example to support- the full, and sufficient, and incontestable answer is Canada. Canada, which, until you can destroy the memory of all that now remains to you of your sovereignty on the North American Continent, is an answer practical, memorable, difficult to be accounted for, but blazing as the sun itself in sight of the whole world, to the whole charge of divided allegiance. At your conquest of Canada, you found it Roman Catholic; you had to choose for her a constitution in Church and State. You were wise enough not to thwart public opinion. Your own conduct towards Presbyterianism in Scotland was an example for imitation; your own conduct towards Catholicism in Ireland was a beacon for avoidance; and in Canada you established and endowed the religion of the people. Canada was your only Roman Catholic colony. Your other colonies revolted; they called on a Catholic power to support them, and they achieved their independence. Catholic Canada, with what Lord Liverpool would call her halfallegiance, alone stood by you. She fought by your side against the interference of Catholic France. To reward and encourage her loyalty, you endowed in Canada bishops to say mass, and to ordain others to say mass, whom, at that very time, your laws would have hanged for saying mass in England; and Canada is still yours, in spite of Catholic France, in spite of her spiritual obedience to the Pope, in spite of Lord Liverpool's argument,

and in spite of the independence of all the states that surround her. This is the only trial you have made. Where you allow to the Roman Catholics their religion undisturbed, it has proved itself to be compatible with the most faithful allegiance. It is only where you have placed allegiance and religion before them as a dilemma, that they have preferred (as who will say they ought not?) their religion to their allegiance. How then stands the imputation? Disproved by history, disproved in all states where both religions co-exist, and in both hemispheres, and asserted in an exposition by Lord Liverpool, solemnly and repeatedly abjured by all Catholics, of the discipline of their church.'-Lord Nugent's Letter, pp. 35, 36.

Can any man who has gained permission to take off his strait-waistcoat, and been out of Bedlam three weeks, believe that the Catholic question will be set to rest by the conversion of the Irish Catholics to the Protestant religion? The best chance of conversion will be gained by taking care that the point of honour is not against conversion.

'We may, I think, collect from what we know of the ordinary feelings of men, that by admitting all to a community of political benefits, we should remove a material impediment that now presents itself to the advances of proselytism to our established mode of worship; particularly assuming, as we do, that it is the purest, and that the disfranchised mode is supported only by superstition and priestcraft. By external pressure and restraint, things are compacted as well in the moral as in the physical world. Where a sect is at spiritual variance with the Established Church, it only requires an abridgement of civil privileges to render it at once a political faction. Its members become instantly pledged, some from enthusiasm, some from resentment, and many from honourable shame, to cleave with desperate fondness to the suffering fortunes of an hereditary religion. Is this human nature, or is it not? Is it a natural or an unnatural feeling for the representative of an ancient Roman Catholic family, even if in his heart he rejected the controverted tenets of his early faith, to scorn an open conformity to ours, so long as such conformity brings with it the irremovable suspicion that faith and conscience may have bowed to the base hope of temporal advantage? Every man must feel and act for himself: but, in my opinion, a good man might be put to difficulty to determine whether more harm is not done by the example of one changing his religion to his worldly advantage,