In the foregoing book we considered these laws in a very simple point of
view, and in a very general one,--merely as a system of hardship
imposed on the body of the community; and from thence, and from some
other arguments, inferred the general injustice of such a procedure. In
this we shall be obliged to be more minute; and the matter will become
more complex as we undertake to demonstrate the mischievous and
impolitic consequences which the particular mode of this oppressive
system, and the instruments which it employs, operating, as we said, on
this extensive object, produce on the national prosperity, quiet, and
security.
The stock of materials by which any nation is rendered flourishing and
prosperous are its industry, its knowledge or skill, its morals, its
execution of justice, its courage, and the national union in directing
these powers to one point, and making them all centre in the public
benefit. Other than these, I do not know and scarcely can conceive any
means by which a community may flourish.
If we show that these penal laws of Ireland destroy not one only, but
every one, of these materials of public prosperity, it will not be
difficult to perceive that Great Britain, whilst they subsist, never can
draw from that country all the advantages to which the bounty of Nature
has entitled it.
To begin with the first great instrument of national happiness and
strength, its industry: I must observe, that, although these penal laws
do, indeed, inflict many hardships on those who are obnoxious to them,
yet their chief, their most extensive, and most certain operation is
upon property. Those civil constitutions which promote industry are such
as facilitate the acquisition, secure the holding, enable the fixing,
and suffer the alienation of property. Every law which obstructs it in
any part of this distribution is, in proportion to the force and extent
of the obstruction, a discouragement to industry. For a law against
property is a law against industry,--the latter having always the
former, and nothing else, for its object. Now as to the acquisition of
landed property, which is the foundation and support of all the other
kinds, the laws have disabled three fourths of the inhabitants of
Ireland from acquiring any estate of inheritance for life or years, or
any charge whatsoever on which two thirds of the improved yearly value
is not reserved for thirty years.
This confinement of landed property to one set of hands, and preventing
its free circulation through the community, is a most leading article of
ill policy; because it is one of the most capital discouragements to all
that industry which may be employed on the lasting improvement of the
soil, or is any way conversant about land. A tenure of thirty years is
evidently no tenure upon which to build, to plant, to raise inclosures,
to change the nature of the ground, to make any new experiment which
might improve agriculture, or to do anything more than what may answer
the immediate and momentary calls of rent to the landlord, and leave
subsistence to the tenant and his family. The desire of acquisition is
always a passion of long views. Confine a man to momentary possession,
and you at once cut off that laudable avarice which every wise state has
cherished as one of the first principles of its greatness. Allow a man
but a temporary possession, lay it down as a maxim that he never can
have any other, and you immediately and infallibly turn him to temporary
enjoyments: and these enjoyments are never the pleasures of labor and
free industry, whose quality it is to famish the present hours and
squander all upon prospect and futurity; they are, on the contrary,
those of a thoughtless, loitering, and dissipated life. The people must
be inevitably disposed to such pernicious habits, merely from the short
duration of their tenure which the law has allowed. But it is not enough
that industry is checked by the confinement of its views; it is further
discouraged by the limitation of its own direct object, profit. This is
a regulation extremely worthy of our attention, as it is not a
consequential, but a direct discouragement to melioration,--as directly
as if the law had said in express terms, "Thou shalt not improve."
But we have an additional argument to demonstrate the ill policy of
denying the occupiers of land any solid property in it. Ireland is a
country wholly unplanted. The farms have neither dwelling-houses nor
good offices; nor are the lands, almost anywhere, provided with fences
and communications: in a word, in a very unimproved state. The
land-owner there never takes upon him, as it is usual in this kingdom,
to supply all these conveniences, and to set down his tenant in what may
be called a completely furnished farm. If the tenant will not do it, it
is never done. This circumstance shows how miserably and peculiarly
impolitic it has been in Ireland to tie down the body of the tenantry to
short and unprofitable tenures. A finished and furnished house will be
taken for any term, however short: if the repair lies on the owner, the
shorter the better. But no one will take one not only unfurnished, but
half built, but upon a term which, on calculation, will answer with
profit all his charges. It is on this principle that the Romans
established their _emphyteusis_, or fee-farm. For though they extended
the ordinary term of their location only to nine years, yet they
encouraged a more permanent letting to farm with the condition of
improvement, as well as of annual payment, on the part of the tenant,
where the land had lain rough and neglected,--and therefore invented
this species of engrafted holding, in the later times, when property
came to be worse distributed by falling into a few hands.
This denial of landed property to the gross of the people has this
further evil effect in preventing the improvement of land, that it
prevents any of the property acquired in trade to be regorged, as it
were, upon the land. They must have observed very little, who have not
remarked the bold and liberal spirit of improvement which persons bred
to trade have often exerted on their land-purchases: that they usually
come to them with a more abundant command of ready money than most
landed men possess; and that they have in general a much better idea, by
long habits of calculative dealings, of the propriety of expending in
order to acquire. Besides, such men often bring their spirit of commerce
into their estates with them, and make manufactures take a root, where
the mere landed gentry had perhaps no capital, perhaps no inclination,
and, most frequently, not sufficient knowledge, to effect anything of
the kind. By these means, what beautiful and useful spots have there not
been made about trading and manufacturing towns, and how has agriculture
had reason to bless that happy alliance with commerce! and how miserable
must that nation be, whose frame of polity has disjoined the landing and
the trading interests!
* * * * *
The great prop of this whole system is not pretended to be its justice
or its utility, but the supposed danger to the state, which gave rise to
it originally, and which, they apprehend, would return, if this system
were overturned. Whilst, say they, the Papists of this kingdom were
possessed of landed property, and of the influence consequent to such
property, their allegiance to the crown of Great Britain was ever
insecure, the public peace was ever liable to be broken, and Protestants
never could be a moment secure either of their properties or of their
lives. Indulgence only made them arrogant, and power daring; confidence
only excited and enabled them to exert their inherent treachery; and the
times which they generally selected for their most wicked and desperate
rebellions were those in which they enjoyed the greatest ease and the
most perfect tranquillity.
Such are the arguments that are used, both publicly and privately, in
every discussion upon this point. They are generally full of passion and
of error, and built upon facts which in themselves are most false. It
cannot, I confess, be denied, that those miserable performances which go
about under the names of Histories of Ireland do, indeed, represent
those events after this manner; and they would persuade us, contrary to
the known order of Nature, that indulgence and moderation in governors
is the natural incitement in subjects to rebel. But there is an interior
history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments,
which speaks a very different language from these histories, from Temple
and from Clarendon: these restore Nature to its just rights, and policy
to its proper order. For they even now show to those who have been at
the pains to examine them, and they may show one day to all the world,
that these rebellions were not produced by toleration, but by
persecution,--that they arose not from just and mild government, but
from the most unparalleled oppression. These records will be far from
giving the least countenance to a doctrine so repugnant to humanity and
good sense as that the security of any establishment, civil or
religious, can ever depend upon the misery of those who live under it,
or that its danger can arise from their quiet and prosperity. God forbid
that the history of this or any country should give such encouragement
to the folly or vices of those who govern! If it can be shown that the
great rebellions of Ireland have arisen from attempts to reduce the
natives to the state to which they are now reduced, it will show that an
attempt to continue them in that state will rather be disadvantageous to
the public peace than any kind of security to it. These things have in
some measure begun to appear already; and as far as regards the argument
drawn from former rebellions, it will fall readily to the ground. But,
for my part, I think the real danger to every state is, to render its
subjects justly discontented; nor is there in polities or science any
more effectual secret for their security than to establish in their
people a firm opinion that no change can be for their advantage. It is
true that bigotry and fanaticism may for a time draw great multitudes of
people from a knowledge of their true and substantial interest. But upon
this I have to remark three things. First, that such a temper can never
become universal, or last for a long time. The principle of religion is
seldom lasting; the majority of men are in no persuasion bigots; they
are not willing to sacrifice, on every vain imagination that
superstition or enthusiasm holds forth, or that even zeal and piety
recommend, the certain possession of their temporal happiness. And if
such a spirit has been at any time roused in a society, after it has had
its paroxysm it commonly subsides and is quiet, and is even the weaker
for the violence of its first exertion: security and ease are its mortal
enemies. But, secondly, if anything can tend to revive and keep it up,
it is to keep alive the passions of men by ill usage. This is enough to
irritate even those who have not a spark of bigotry in their
constitution to the most desperate enterprises; it certainly will
inflame, darken, and render more dangerous the spirit of bigotry in
those who are possessed by it. Lastly, by rooting out any sect, you are
never secure against the effects of fanaticism; it may arise on the side
of the most favored opinions; and many are the instances wherein the
established religion of a state has grown ferocious and turned upon its
keeper, and has often torn to pieces the civil establishment that had
cherished it, and which it was designed to support:
France,--England,--Holland.
But there may be danger of wishing a change, even where no religious
motive can operate; and every enemy to such a state comes as a friend to
the subject; and where other countries are under terror, they begin to
hope.
This argument _ad verecundiam_ has as much force as any such have. But I
think it fares but very indifferently with those who make use of it; for
they would get but little to be proved abettors of tyranny at the
expense of putting me to an inconvenient acknowledgment. For if I were
to confess that there are circumstances in which it would be better to
establish such a religion....
* * * * *
With regard to the Pope's interest. This foreign chief of their religion
cannot be more formidable to us than to other Protestant countries. To
conquer that country for himself is a wild chimera; to encourage revolt
in favor of foreign princes is an exploded idea in the politics of that
court. Perhaps it would be full as dangerous to have the people under
the conduct of factious pastors of their own as under a foreign
ecclesiastical court.
* * * * *
In the second year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth were enacted several
limitations in the acquisition or the retaining of property, which had,
so far as regarded any general principles, hitherto remained untouched
under all changes.
These bills met no opposition either in the Irish Parliament or in the
English Council, except from private agents, who were little attended
to; and they passed into laws with the highest and most general
applauses, as all such things are in the beginning, not as a system of
persecution, but as masterpieces of the most subtle and refined
politics. And to say the truth, these laws, at first view, have rather
an appearance of a plan of vexatious litigation and crooked
law-chicanery than of a direct and sanguinary attack upon the rights of
private conscience: because they did not affect life, at least with
regard to the laity; and making the Catholic opinions rather the subject
of civil regulations than of criminal prosecutions, to those who are
not lawyers and read these laws they only appear to be a species of
jargon. For the execution of criminal law has always a certain
appearance of violence. Being exercised directly on the persons of the
supposed offenders, and commonly executed in the face of the public,
such executions are apt to excite sentiments of pity for the sufferers,
and indignation against those who are employed in such cruelties,--being
seen as single acts of cruelty, rather than as ill general principles of
government. But the operation of the laws in question being such as
common feeling brings home to every man's bosom, they operate in a sort
of comparative silence and obscurity; and though their cruelty is
exceedingly great, it is never seen in a single exertion, and always
escapes commiseration, being scarce known, except to those who view them
in a general, which is always a cold and phlegmatic light. The first of
these laws being made with so general a satisfaction, as the chief
governors found that such things were extremely acceptable to the
leading people in that country, they were willing enough to gratify them
with the ruin of their fellow-citizens; they were not sorry to divert
their attention from other inquiries, and to keep them fixed to this, as
if this had been the only real object of their national politics; and
for many years there was no speech from the throne which did not with
great appearance of seriousness recommend the passing of such laws, and
scarce a session went over without in effect passing some of them, until
they have by degrees grown to be the most considerable head in the Irish
statute-book. At the same time giving a temporary and occasional
mitigation to the severity of some of the harshest of those laws, they
appeared in some sort the protectors of those whom they were in reality
destroying by the establishment of general constitutions against them.
At length, however, the policy of this expedient is worn out; the
passions of men are cooled; those laws begin to disclose themselves, and
to produce effects very different from those which were promised in
making them: for crooked counsels are ever unwise; and nothing can be
more absurd and dangerous than to tamper with the natural foundations of
society, in hopes of keeping it up by certain contrivances.
* * * * *
A
LETTER
TO
WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ.,
ON THE SUBJECT OF
CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.
JANUARY 29, 1795.
LETTER.[23]
My Dear sir,--Your letter is, to myself, infinitely obliging: with
regard to you, I can find no fault with it, except that of a tone of
humility and disqualification, which neither your rank, nor the place
you are in, nor the profession you belong to, nor your very
extraordinary learning and talents, will in propriety demand or perhaps
admit. These dispositions will be still less proper, if you should feel
them in the extent your modesty leads you to express them. You have
certainly given by far too strong a proof of self-diffidence by asking
the opinion of a man circumstanced as I am, on the important subject of
your letter. You are far more capable of forming just conceptions upon
it than I can be. However, since you are pleased to command me to lay
before you my thoughts, as materials upon which your better judgment may
operate, I shall obey you, and submit them, with great deference, to
your melioration or rejection.
But first permit me to put myself in the right. I owe you an answer to
your former letter. It did not desire one, but it deserved it. If not
for an answer, it called for an acknowledgment. It was a new favor; and,
indeed, I should be worse than insensible, if I did not consider the
honors you have heaped upon me with no sparing hand with becoming
gratitude. But your letter arrived to me at a time when the closing of
my long and last business in life, a business extremely complex, and
full of difficulties and vexations of all sorts, occupied me in a manner
which those who have not seen the interior as well as exterior of it
cannot easily imagine. I confess that in the crisis of that rude
conflict I neglected many things that well deserved my best
attention,--none that deserved it better, or have caused me more regret
in the neglect, than your letter. The instant that business was over,
and the House had passed its judgment on the conduct of the managers, I
lost no time to execute what for years I had resolved on: it was, to
quit my public station, and to seek that tranquillity, in my very
advanced age, to which, after a very tempestuous life, I thought myself
entitled. But God has thought fit (and I unfeignedly acknowledge His
justice) to dispose of things otherwise. So heavy a calamity has fallen
upon me as to disable me for business and to disqualify me for repose.
The existence I have I do not know that I can call life. Accordingly, I
do not meddle with any one measure of government, though, for what
reasons I know not, you seem to suppose me deeply in the secret of
affairs. I only know, so far as your side of the water is concerned,
that your present excellent Lord Lieutenant (the best man in every
relation that I have ever been acquainted with) has perfectly pure
intentions with regard to Ireland, and of course that he wishes
cordially well to those who form the great mass of its inhabitants, and
who, as they are well or ill managed, must form an important part of its
strength or weakness. If with regard to that great object he has
carried over any ready-made system, I assure you it is perfectly unknown
to me: I am very much retired from the world, and live in much
ignorance. This, I hope, will form my humble apology, if I should err in
the notions I entertain of the question which is soon to become the
subject of your deliberations. At the same time accept it as an apology
for my neglects.
You need make no apology for your attachment to the religious
description you belong to. It proves (as in you it is sincere) your
attachment to the great points in which the leading divisions are
agreed, when the lesser, in which they differ, are so dear to you. I
shall never call any religious opinions, which appear important to
serious and pious minds, things of no consideration. Nothing is so fatal
to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity. As
long as men hold charity and justice to be essential integral parts of
religion, there can be little danger from a strong attachment to
particular tenets in faith. This I am perfectly sure is your case; but I
am not equally sure that either zeal for the tenets of faith, or the
smallest degree of charity or justice, have much influenced the
gentlemen who, under pretexts of zeal, have resisted the enfranchisement
of their country. My dear son, who was a person of discernment, as well
as clear and acute in his expressions, said, in a letter of his which I
have seen, "that, in order to grace their cause, and to draw some
respect to their persons, they pretend to be bigots." But here, I take
it, we have not much to do with the theological tenets on the one side
of the question or the other. The point itself is practically decided.
That religion is owned by the state. Except in a settled maintenance, it
is protected. A great deal of the rubbish, which, as a nuisance, long
obstructed the way, is removed. One impediment remained longer, as a
matter to justify the proscription of the body of our country; after the
rest had been abandoned as untenable ground. But the business of the
Pope (that mixed person of polities and religion) has long ceased to be
a bugbear: for some time past he has ceased to be even a colorable
pretext. This was well known, when the Catholics of these kingdoms, for
our amusement, were obliged on oath to disclaim him in his political
capacity,--which implied an allowance for them to recognize him in some
sort of ecclesiastical superiority. It was a compromise of the old
dispute.
For my part, I confess I wish that we had been less eager in this point.
I don't think, indeed, that much mischief will happen from it, if things
are otherwise properly managed. Too nice an inquisition ought not to be
made into opinions that are dying away of themselves. Had we lived an
hundred and fifty years ago, I should have been as earnest and anxious
as anybody for this sort of abjuration; but, living at the time in which
I live, and obliged to speculate forward instead of backward, I must
fairly say, I could well endure the existence of every sort of
collateral aid which opinion might, in the now state of things, afford
to authority. I must see much more danger than in my life I have seen,
or than others will venture seriously to affirm that they see, in the
Pope aforesaid, (though a foreign power, and with his long tail of _et
ceteras_,) before I should be active in weakening any hold which
government might think it prudent to resort to, in the management of
that large part of the king's subjects. I do not choose to direct all my
precautions to the part where the danger does not press, and to leave
myself open and unguarded where I am not only really, but visibly
attacked.
My whole politics, at present, centre in one point, and to this the
merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable,--that is, what
will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism. What is
Jacobinism? It is an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate
prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power
and authority into the hands of the persons capable of occasionally
enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have
resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of
the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army
for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them
as a bribe the spoils of the rich. This I take to be a fair description
of the principles and leading maxims of the enlightened of our day who
are commonly called Jacobins.
As the grand prejudice, and that which holds all the other prejudices
together, the first, last, and middle object of their hostility is
religion. With that they are at inexpiable war. They make no distinction
of sects. A Christian, as such, is to them an enemy. What, then, is left
to a real Christian, (Christian as a believer and as a statesman,) but
to make a league between all the grand divisions of that name, to
protect and to cherish them all, and by no means to proscribe in any
manner, more or less, any member of our common party? The divisions
which formerly prevailed in the Church, with all their overdone zeal,
only purified and ventilated our common faith, because there was no
common enemy arrayed and embattled to take advantage of their
dissensions; but now nothing but inevitable ruin will be the consequence
of our quarrels. I think we may dispute, rail, persecute, and provoke
the Catholics out of their prejudices; but it is not in ours they will
take refuge. If anything is, one more than another, out of the power of
man, it is to _create_ a prejudice. Somebody has said, that a king may
make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.
All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The
support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret
dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell; but, humanly
speaking, they are all _prescriptive_ religions. They have all stood
long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices
their main stay. The people who compose the four grand divisions of
Christianity have now their religion as an habit, and upon authority,
and not on disputation,--as all men who have their religion derived from
their parents and the fruits of education _must_ have it, however the
one more than the other may be able to reconcile his faith to his own
reason or to that of other men. Depend upon it, they must all be
supported, or they must all fall in the crash of a common ruin. The
Catholics are the far more numerous part of the Christians in your
country; and how can Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be
supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of
the greater number of Christians? It is a great truth, and which in one
of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons
in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the
infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any
Protestant Church, can survive that event. Therefore my humble and
decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less
in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the
legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all
countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly
the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and
veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of
making it a blessing to the people who profess it,--that it ought to be
cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a
choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. If
this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see
that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that
account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the
fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject. I am the more
serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion,
(always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief
and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most
effectual barrier, if not the sole barrier, against Jacobinism. The
Catholics form the great body of the lower ranks of your community, and
no small part of those classes of the middling that come nearest to
them. You know that the seduction of that part of mankind from the
principles of religion, morality, subordination, and social order is the
great object of the Jacobins. Let them grow lax, skeptical, careless,
and indifferent with regard to religion, and, so sure as we have an
existence, it is not a zealous Anglican or Scottish Church principle,
but direct Jacobinism, which will enter into that breach. Two hundred
years dreadfully spent in experiments to force that people to change the
form of their religion have proved fruitless. You have now your choice,
for full four fifths of your people, of the Catholic religion or
Jacobinism. If things appear to you to stand on this alternative, I
think you will not be long in making your option.
You have made, as you naturally do, a very able analysis of powers, and
have separated, as the things are separable, civil from political
powers. You start, too, a question, whether the civil can be secured
without some share in the political. For my part, as abstract questions,
I should find some difficulty in an attempt to resolve them. But as
applied to the state of Ireland, to the form of our commonwealth, to the
parties that divide us, and to the dispositions of the leading men in
those parties, I cannot hesitate to lay before you my opinion, that,
whilst any kind of discouragements and disqualifications remain on the
Catholics, an handle will be made by a factious power utterly to defeat
the benefits of any civil rights they may apparently possess. I need not
go to very remote times for my examples. It was within the course of
about a twelvemonth, that, after Parliament had been led into a step
quite unparalleled in its records, after they had resisted all
concession, and even hearing, with an obstinacy equal to anything that
could have actuated a party domination in the second or eighth of Queen
Anne, after the strange adventure of the Grand Juries, and after
Parliament had listened to the sovereign pleading for the emancipation
of his subjects,--it was after all this, that such a grudging and
discontent was expressed as must justly have alarmed, as it did
extremely alarm, the whole of the Catholic body: and I remember but one
period in my whole life (I mean the savage period between 1781 and 1767)
in which they have been more harshly or contumeliously treated than
since the last partial enlargement. And thus I am convinced it will be,
by paroxysms, as long as any stigma remains on them, and whilst they are
considered as no better than half citizens. If they are kept such for
any length of time, they will be made whole Jacobins. Against this grand
and dreadful evil of our time (I do not love to cheat myself or others)
I do not know any solid security whatsoever; but I am quite certain that
what will come nearest to it is to interest as many as you can in the
present order of things, religiously, civilly, politically, by all the
ties and principles by which mankind are held. This is like to be
effectual policy: I am sure it is honorable policy: and it is better to
fail, if fail we must, in the paths of direct and manly than of low and
crooked wisdom.
As to the capacity of sitting in Parliament, after all the capacities
for voting, for the army, for the navy, for the professions, for civil
offices, it is a dispute _de lana caprina_, in my poor opinion,--at
least on the part of those who oppose it. In the first place, this
admission to office, and this exclusion from Parliament, on the
principle of an exclusion from political power, is the very reverse of
the principle of the English Test Act. If I were to form a judgment from
experience rather than theory, I should doubt much whether the capacity
for or even the possession of a seat in Parliament did really convey
much of power to be properly called political. I have sat there, with
some observation, for nine-and-twenty years, or thereabouts. The power
of a member of Parliament is uncertain and indirect; and if power,
rather than splendor and fame, were the object, I should think that any
of the principal clerks in office, to say nothing of their superiors,
(several of whom are disqualified by law for seats in Parliament,)
possess far more power than nine tenths of the members of the House of
Commons. I might say this of men who seemed, from their fortunes, their
weight in their country, and their talents, to be persons of figure
there,--and persons, too, not in opposition to the prevailing party in
government. But be they what they will, on a fair canvass of the several
prevalent Parliamentary interests in Ireland, I cannot, out of the three
hundred members of whom the Irish Parliament is composed, discover that
above three, or at the utmost four, Catholics would be returned to the
House of Commons. But suppose they should amount to thirty, that is, to
a tenth part, (a thing I hold impossible for a long series of years, and
never very likely to happen,) what is this to those who are to balance
them in the one House, and the clear and settled majority in the other?
For I think it absolutely impossible, that, in the course of many years,
above four or five peers should be created of that communion. In fact,
the exclusion of them seems to me only to mark jealousy and suspicion,
and not to provide security in any way.--But I return to the old ground.
The danger is not there: these are things long since done away. The
grand controversy is no longer between you and them.
Forgive this length. My pen has insensibly run on. You are yourself to
blame, if you are much fatigued. I congratulate you on the auspicious
opening of your session. Surely Great Britain and Ireland ought to join
in wreathing a never-fading garland for the head of Grattan. Adieu, my
dear Sir. Good nights to you!--I never can have any.
Yours always most sincerely,
EDMUND BURKE.
Jan. 29th, 1795. Twelve at night.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] William Smith, Esq., to whom this Letter is addressed, was then a
member of the Irish Parliament: he is now (1812) one of the Barons of
the Court of Exchequer in Ireland.
SECOND LETTER
TO
SIR HERCULES LANGRISHE
ON THE
CATHOLIC QUESTION.
MAY 26, 1795.
My Dear Sir,--If I am not as early as I ought to be in my
acknowledgments for your very kind letter, pray do me the justice to
attribute my failure to its natural and but too real cause, a want of
the most ordinary power of exertion, owing to the impressions made upon
an old and infirm constitution by private misfortune and by public
calamity. It is true, I make occasional efforts to rouse myself to
something better,--but I soon relapse into that state of languor which
must be the habit of my body and understanding to the end of my short
and cheerless existence in this world.
I am sincerely grateful for your kindness in connecting the interest you
take in the sentiments of an old friend with the able part you take in
the service of your country. It is an instance, among many, of that
happy temper which has always given a character of amenity to your
virtues and a good-natured direction to your talents.
Your speech on the Catholic question I read with much satisfaction. It
is solid; it is convincing; it is eloquent; and it ought, on the spot,
to have produced that effect which its reason, and that contained in the
other excellent speeches on the same side of the question, cannot
possibly fail (though with less pleasant consequences) to produce
hereafter. What a sad thing it is, that the grand instructor, Time, has
not yet been able to teach the grand lesson of his own value, and that,
in every question of moral and political prudence, it is the choice of
the moment which renders the measure serviceable or useless, noxious or
salutary!
In the Catholic question I considered only one point: Was it, at the
time, and in the circumstances, a measure which tended to promote the
concord of the citizens? I have no difficulty in saying it was,--and as
little in saying that the present concord of the citizens was worth
buying, at a critical season, by granting a few _capacities_, which
probably no one man now living is likely to be served or hurt by. When
any man tells _you_ and _me_, that, if these places were left in the
discretion of a Protestant crown, and these memberships in the
discretion of Protestant electors or patrons, we should have a Popish
official system, and a Popish representation, capable of overturning the
Establishment, he only insults our understandings. When any man tells
this to _Catholics_, he insults their understandings, and he galls their
feelings. It is not the question of the places and seats, it is the real
hostile disposition and the _pretended_ fears, that leave stings in the
minds of the people. I really thought that in the total of the late
circumstances, with regard to persons, to things, to principles, and to
measures, was to be found a conjuncture favorable to the introduction
and to the perpetuation of a general harmony, producing a general
strength, which to that hour Ireland was never so happy as to enjoy. My
sanguine hopes are blasted, and I must consign my feelings on that
terrible disappointment to the same patience in which I have been
obliged to bury the vexation I suffered on the defeat of the other
great, just, and honorable causes in which I have had some share, and
which have given more of dignity than of peace and advantage to a long,
laborious life. Though, perhaps, a want of success might be urged as a
reason for making me doubt of the justice of the part I have taken, yet,
until I have other lights than one side of the debate has furnished me,
I must see things, and feel them too, as I see and feel them. I think I
can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant
ascendency, as they affect Ireland,--or of Indianism, as they affect
these countries, and as they affect Asia,--or of Jacobinism, as they
affect all Europe and the state of human society itself. The last is the
greatest evil. But it readily combines with the others, and flows from
them. Whatever breeds discontent at this time will produce that great
master-mischief most infallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people
that the _few_, called by whatever name you please, religious or
political, are of opinion that their interest is not compatible with
that of the _many_, is a great point gained to Jacobinism. Whatever
tends to irritate the talents of a country, which have at all times, and
at these particularly, a mighty influence on the public mind, is of
infinite service to that formidable cause. Unless where Heaven has
mingled uncommon ingredients of virtue in the composition,--_quos
meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan,_--talents naturally gravitate to
Jacobinism. Whatever ill-humors are afloat in the state, they will be
sure to discharge themselves in a mingled torrent in the _Cloaca Maxima_
of Jacobinism. Therefore people ought well to look about them. First,
the physicians are to take care that they do nothing to irritate this
epidemical distemper. It is a foolish thing to have the better of the
patient in a dispute. The complaint or its cause ought to be removed,
and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor. They
ought to be the _ultima_, not the _prima_, not the _tota_ ratio of a
wise government. God forbid, that, on a worthy occasion, authority
should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it! But where
a prudent and enlarged policy does not precede it, and attend it too,
where the hearts of the better sort of people do not go with the hands
of the soldiery, you may call your Constitution what you will, in effect
it will consist of three parts, (orders, if you please,) cavalry,
infantry, and artillery,--and of nothing else or better. I agree with
you in your dislike of the discourses in Francis Street: but I like as
little some of those in College Green. I am even less pleased with the
temper that predominated in the latter, as better things might have been
expected in the regular family mansion of public discretion than, in a
new and hasty assembly of unexperienced men, congregated under
circumstances of no small irritation. After people have taken your
tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be
marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous
persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not
to be surprised, if they fall into a passion, and talk as men in a
passion do, intemperately and idly.
The worst of the matter is this: you are partly leading, partly driving
into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious
principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an
invincible dike against that inundation. This you have a thousand
mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish. You make a sad story of the
Pope. _O seri studiorum_! It will not be difficult to get many called
Catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion. Never
doubt it. You have succeeded in part, and you may succeed completely.
But in the present state of men's minds and affairs, do not flatter
yourselves that they will piously look to the head of our Church in the
place of that Pope whom you make them forswear, and out of all reverence
to whom you bully and rail and buffoon them. Perhaps you may succeed in
the same manner with all the other tenets of doctrine and usages of
discipline amongst the Catholics; but what security have you, that, in
the temper and on the principles on which they have made this change,
they will stop at the exact sticking-places you have marked in _your_
articles? You have no security for anything, but that they will become
what are called _Franco-Jacobins_, and reject the whole together. No
converts now will be made in a considerable number from one of our sects
to the other upon a really religious principle. Controversy moves in
another direction.
Next to religion, _property_ is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here
many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the
Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics
desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext,
(though Protestants might suppose it just _possible_ for men to like
good places and snug boroughs for their own merits,) but that their real
view is, to strip Protestants of their property To my certain knowledge,
till those Jacobin lectures were opened in the House of Commons, they
never dreamt of any such thing; but now the great professors may
stimulate them to inquire (on the new principles) into the foundation of
that property, and of all property. If you treat men as robbers, why,
robbers, sooner or later, they will become.
A third point of Jacobin attack is on _old traditionary constitutions_.
You are apprehensive for yours, which leans from its perpendicular, and
does not stand firm on its theory. I like Parliamentary reforms as
little as any man who has boroughs to sell for money, or for peerages in
Ireland. But it passes my comprehension, in what manner it is that men
can be reconciled to the _practical_ merits of a constitution, the
theory of which is in litigation, by being _practically_ excluded from
any of its advantages. Let us put ourselves in the place of these
people, and try an experiment of the effects of such a procedure on our
own minds. Unquestionably, we should be perfectly satisfied, when we
were told that Houses of Parliament, instead of being places of refuge
for popular liberty, were citadels for keeping us in order as a
conquered people. These things play the Jacobin game to a nicety.
Indeed, my dear Sir, there is not a single particular in the
Francis-Street declamations, which has not, to your and to my certain
knowledge, been taught by the jealous ascendants, sometimes by doctrine,
sometimes by example, always by provocation. Remember the whole of 1781
and 1782, in Parliament and out of Parliament; at this very day, and in
the worst acts and designs, observe the tenor of the objections with
which the College-Green orators of the ascendency reproach the
Catholics. You have observed, no doubt, how much they rely on the
affair of Jackson. Is it not pleasant to hear Catholics reproached for a
supposed connection--with whom?--with Protestant clergymen! with
Protestant gentlemen! with Mr. Jackson! with Mr. Rowan, &c, &c.! But
_egomet mî ignosco_. Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures,
not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of Papists.
Indeed, all this will do, perhaps, well enough, with detachments of
dismounted cavalry and fencibles from England. But let us not say to
Catholics, by way of _argument_, that they are to be kept in a degraded
state, because some of them are no better than many of us Protestants.
The thing I most disliked in some of their speeches (those, I mean, of
the Catholics) was what is called the spirit of liberality, so much and
so diligently taught by the ascendants, by which they are made to
abandon their own particular interests, and to merge them in the general
discontents of the country. It gave me no pleasure to hear of the
dissolution of the committee. There were in it a majority, to my
knowledge, of very sober, well-intentioned men; and there were none in
it but such who, if not continually goaded and irritated, might be made
useful to the tranquillity of the country. It is right always to have a
few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the
many, both for the interests of the description, and for the general
interest.
Excuse me, my dear friend, if I have a little tried your patience. You
have brought this trouble on yourself, by your thinking of a man forgot,
and who has no objection to be forgot, by the world. These things we
discussed together four or five and thirty years ago. We were then, and
at bottom ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of
the whole and of every part of the penal system. You and I, and
everybody, must now and then ply and bend to the occasion, and take what
can be got. But very sure I am, that, whilst there remains in the law
any principle whatever which can furnish to certain politicians an
excuse for raising an opinion of their own importance, as necessary to
keep their fellow-subjects in order, the obnoxious people will be
fretted, harassed, insulted, provoked to discontent and disorder, and
practically excluded from the partial advantages from which the letter
of the law does not exclude them.
Adieu! my dear Sir,
And believe me very truly yours,
EDMUND BURKE.
BEACONSFIELD, May 26, 1795.
A
LETTER
TO
RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.,
ON
PROTESTANT ASCENDENCY IN IRELAND.
1793.
My dear son,--We are all again assembled in town, to finish the last,
but the most laborious, of the tasks which have been imposed upon me
during my Parliamentary service. We are as well as at our time of life
we can expect to be. We have, indeed, some moments of anxiety about you.
You are engaged in an undertaking similar in its principle to mine. You
are engaged in the relief of an oppressed people. In that service you
must necessarily excite the same sort of passions in those who have
exercised, and who wish to continue that oppression, that I have had to
struggle with in this long labor. As your father has done, you must make
enemies of many of the rich, of the proud, and of the powerful. I and
you began in the same way. I must confess, that, if our place was of our
choice, I could wish it had been your lot to begin the career of your
life with an endeavor to render some more moderate and less invidious
service to the public But being engaged in a great and critical work, I
have not the least hesitation about your having hitherto done your duty
as becomes you. If I had not an assurance not to be shaken from the
character of your mind, I should be satisfied on that point by the cry
that is raised against you. If you had behaved, as they call it,
discreetly, that is, faintly and treacherously, in the execution of your
trust, you would have had, for a while, the good word of all sorts of
men, even of many of those whose cause you had betrayed,--and whilst
your favor lasted, you might have coined that false reputation into a
true and solid interest to yourself. This you are well apprised of; and
you do not refuse to travel that beaten road from an ignorance, but from
a contempt, of the objects it leads to.
When you choose an arduous and slippery path, God forbid that any weak
feelings of my declining age, which calls for soothings and supports,
and which can have none but from you, should make me wish that you
should abandon what you are about, or should trifle with it! In this
house we submit, though with troubled minds, to that order which has
connected all great duties with toils and with perils, which has
conducted the road to glory through the regions of obloquy and reproach,
and which will never suffer the disparaging alliance of spurious, false,
and fugitive praise with genuine and permanent reputation. We know that
the Power which has settled that order, and subjected you to it by
placing you in the situation you are in, is able to bring you out of it
with credit and with safety. His will be done! All must come right. You
may open the way with pain and under reproach: others will pursue it
with ease and with applause.
I am sorry to find that pride and passion, and that sort of zeal for
religion which never shows any wonderful heat but when it afflicts and
mortifies our neighbor, will not let the ruling description perceive
that the privilege for which your clients contend is very nearly as much
for the benefit of those who refuse it as those who ask it. I am not to
examine into the charges that are daily made on the administration of
Ireland. I am not qualified to say how much in them is cold truth, and
how much rhetorical exaggeration. Allowing some foundation to the
complaint, it is to no purpose that these people allege that their
government is a job in its administration. I am sure it is a job in its
constitution; nor is it possible a scheme of polity, which, in total
exclusion of the body of the community, confines (with little or no
regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favored
citizens the rights which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by
the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the
persons who administer in that government to prefer their own
particular, but well-understood, private interest to the false and
ill-calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong
to. Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances. I
have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force by the
native vigor of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and
climate that it grows in. But speaking of things in their ordinary
course, in a country of monopoly there _can_ be no patriotism. There may
be a party spirit, but public spirit there can be none. As to a spirit
of liberty, still less can it exist, or anything like it. A liberty made
up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a liberty made up of
exclusion and proscription, continued for ages, of four fifths, perhaps,
of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes In what does such liberty
differ from the description of the most shocking kind of servitude?
But it will be said, in that country some people are free. Why, this is
the very description of despotism. _Partial freedom is privilege and
prerogative, and not liberty._ Liberty, such as deserves the name, is
an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle. It is a great
and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It
is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty license
of some potent individual or some predominant faction.
If anything ought to be despotic in a country, it is its government;
because there is no cause of constant operation to make its yoke
unequal. But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by
its very essence, lean upon the prostrate description. A constitution
formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to
overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor
of freedom. It compels that power which ought, and often would be
disposed, _equally_ to protect the subjects, to fail in its trust, to
counteract its purposes, and to become no better than the instrument of
the wrongs of a faction. Some degree of influence must exist in all
governments. But a government which has no interest to please the body
of the people, and can neither support them nor with safety call for
their support, nor is of power to sway the domineering faction, can only
exist by corruption; and taught by that monopolizing party which usurps
the title and qualities of the public to consider the body of the people
as out of the constitution, they will consider those who are in it in
the light in which they choose to consider themselves. The whole
relation of government and of freedom will be a battle or a traffic.
This system, in its real nature, and under its proper appellations, is
odious and unnatural, especially when a constitution is admitted which
not only, as all constitutions do profess, has a regard to the good of
the multitude, but in its theory makes profession of their power also.
But of late this scheme of theirs has been new-christened,--_honestum
nomen imponitur vitio_. A word has been lately struck in the mint of the
Castle of Dublin; thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or City-Hall,
where, having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably
stamped and vouched, it soon became current in Parliament, and was
carried back by the Speaker of the House of Commons in great pomp, as an
offering of homage from whence it came. The word is _ascendency_. It is
not absolutely new. But the sense in which I have hitherto seen it used
was to signify an influence obtained over the minds of some other person
by love and reverence, or by superior management and dexterity. It had,
therefore, to this its promotion no more than a moral, not a civil or
political use. But I admit it is capable of being so applied; and if the
Lord Mayor of Dublin, and the Speaker of the Irish Parliament, who
recommend the preservation of the Protestant ascendency, mean to employ
the word in that sense,--that is, if they understand by it the
preservation of the influence of that description of gentlemen over the
Catholics by means of an authority derived from their wisdom and virtue,
and from an opinion they raise in that people of a pious regard and
affection for their freedom and happiness,--it is impossible not to
commend their adoption of so apt a term into the family of politics. It
may be truly said to enrich the language. Even if the Lord Mayor and
Speaker mean to insinuate that this influence is to be obtained and held
by flattering their people, by managing them, by skilfully adapting
themselves to the humors and passions of those whom they would govern,
he must be a very untoward critic who would cavil even at this use of
the word, though such cajoleries would perhaps be more prudently
practised than professed. These are all meanings laudable, or at least
tolerable. But when we look a little more narrowly, and compare it with
the plan to which it owes its present technical application, I find it
has strayed far from its original sense. It goes much further than the
privilege allowed by Horace. It is more than _parce detortum_. This
Protestant ascendency means nothing less than an influence obtained by
virtue, by love, or even by artifice and seduction,--full as little an
influence derived from the means by which ministers have obtained an
influence which might be called, without straining, an _ascendency_, in
public assemblies in England, that is, by a liberal distribution of
places and pensions, and other graces of government. This last is wide
indeed of the signification of the word. New _ascendency_ is the old
_mastership_. It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set
of people in Ireland to consider themselves as the sole citizens in the
commonwealth, and to keep a dominion over the rest by reducing them to
absolute slavery under a military power, and, thus fortified in their
power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general
contribution, as a military booty, solely amongst themselves.
The poor word _ascendency_, so soft and melodious in its sound, so
lenitive and emollient in its first usage, is now employed to cover to
the world the most rigid, and perhaps not the most wise, of all plans of
policy. The word is large enough in its comprehension. I cannot
conceive what mode of oppression in civil life, or what mode of
religious persecution, may not come within the methods of preserving an
_ascendency_. In plain old English, as they apply it, it signifies
_pride and dominion_ on the one part of the relation, and on the other
_subserviency and contempt_,--and it signifies nothing else. The old
words are as fit to be set to music as the new: but use has long since
affixed to them their true signification, and they sound, as the other
will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ears of mankind.
This ascendency, by being a _Protestant_ ascendency, does not better it
from the combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale.
If Protestant ascendency means the proscription from citizenship of by
far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant
ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence. But there
is a deeper evil. By the use that is so frequently made of the term, and
the policy which is engrafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing
more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation
of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of
ascertained tenets of its own upon the ground of which it persecutes
other men: for the patrons of this Protestant ascendency neither do nor
can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word
Protestant. It is defined, as Cowley defines wit, not by what it is, but
by what it is not. It is not the Christian religion as professed in the
churches holding communion with Rome, the majority of Christians: that
is all which, in the latitude of the term, is known about its
signification. This makes such persecutors ten times worse than any of
that description that hitherto have been known in the world. The old
persecutors, whether Pagan or Christian, whether Arian or Orthodox,
whether Catholics, Anglicans, or Calvinists, actually were, or at least
had the decorum to pretend to be, strong dogmatists. They pretended that
their religious maxims were clear and ascertained, and so useful that
they were bound, for the eternal benefit of mankind, to defend or
diffuse them, though by any sacrifices of the temporal good of those who
were the objects of their system of experiment.
The bottom of this theory of persecution is false. It is not permitted
to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas
of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions. By making men
miserable in this life, they counteract one of the great ends of
charity, which is, in as much as in us lies, to make men happy in every
period of their existence, and most in what most depends upon us. But
give to these old persecutors their mistaken principle, in their
reasoning they are consistent, and in their tempers they may be even
kind and good-natured. But whenever a faction would render millions of
mankind miserable, some millions of the race coexistent with themselves,
and many millions in their succession, without knowing or so much as
pretending to ascertain the doctrines of their own school, (in which
there is much of the lash and nothing of the lesson,) the errors which
the persons in such a faction fall into are not those that are natural
to human imbecility, nor is the least mixture of mistaken kindness to
mankind an ingredient in the severities they inflict. The whole is
nothing but pure and perfect malice. It is, indeed, a perfection in that
kind belonging to beings of an higher order than man, and to them we
ought to leave it.
This kind of persecutors without zeal, without charity, know well enough
that religion, to pass by all questions of the truth or falsehood of any
of its particular systems, (a matter I abandon to the theologians on all
sides,) is a source of great comfort to us mortals, in this our short,
but tedious journey through the world. They know, that, to enjoy this
consolation, men must believe their religion upon some principle or
other, whether of education, habit, theory, or authority. When men are
driven from any of those principles on which they have received
religion, without embracing with the same assurance and cordiality some
other system, a dreadful void is left in their minds, and a terrible
shook is given to their morals. They lose their guide, their comfort,
their hope. None but the most cruel and hardhearted of men, who had
banished all natural tenderness from their minds, such as those beings
of iron, the atheists, could bring themselves to any persecution like
this. Strange it is, but so it is, that men, driven by force from their
habits in one mode of religion, have, by contrary habits, under the same
force, often quietly settled in another. They suborn their reason to
declare in favor of their necessity. Man and his conscience cannot
always be at war. If the first races have not been able to make a
pacification between the conscience and the convenience, their
descendants come generally to submit to the violence of the laws,
without violence to their minds. As things stood formerly, they
possessed a _positive_ scheme of direction and of consolation. In this
men may acquiesce. The harsh methods in use with the old class of
persecutors were to make converts, not apostates only. If they
perversely hated other sects and factions, they loved their own
inordinately. But in this Protestant persecution there is anything but
benevolence at work. What do the Irish statutes? They do not make a
conformity to the _established_ religion, and to its doctrines and
practices, the condition of getting out of servitude. No such thing. Let
three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors
have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms
the most degrading, scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and
virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the
education they have received, and nothing more is required of them.
There is no system of folly, or impiety, or blasphemy, or atheism, into
which they may not throw themselves, and which they may not profess
openly, and as a system, consistently with the enjoyment of all the
privileges of a free citizen in the happiest constitution in the world.
Some of the unhappy assertors of this strange scheme say they are not
persecutors on account of religion. In the first place, they say what is
not true. For what else do they disfranchise the people? If the man gets
rid of a religion through which their malice operates, he gets rid of
all their penalties and incapacities at once. They never afterwards
inquire about him. I speak here of their pretexts, and not of the true
spirit of the transaction, in which religious bigotry, I apprehend, has
little share. Every man has his taste; but I think, if I were so
miserable and undone as to be guilty of premeditated and continued
violence towards any set of men, I had rather that my conduct was
supposed to arise from wild conceits concerning their religious
advantages than from low and ungenerous motives relative to my own
selfish interest. I had rather be thought insane in my charity than
rational in my malice. This much, my dear son, I have to say of this
Protestant persecution,--that is, a persecution of religion itself.
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
People soon forget the meaning, but the impression and the passion
remain. The word Protestant is the charm that looks up in the dungeon of
servitude three millions of your people. It is not amiss to consider
this spell of potency, this abracadabra, that is hung about the necks of
the unhappy, not to heal, but to communicate disease. We sometimes hear
of a Protestant _religion_, frequently of a Protestant _interest_. We
hear of the latter the most frequently, because it has a positive
meaning. The other has none. We hear of it the most frequently, because
it has a word in the phrase which, well or ill understood, has animated
to persecution and oppression at all times infinitely more than all the
dogmas in dispute between religious factions. These are, indeed, well
formed to perplex and torment the intellect, but not half so well
calculated to inflame the passions and animosities of men.
I do readily admit that a great deal of the wars, seditions, and
troubles of the world did formerly turn upon the contention between
_interests_ that went by the names of Protestant and Catholic. But I
imagined that at this time no one was weak enough to believe, or
impudent enough to pretend, that questions of Popish and Protestant
opinions or interest are the things by which men are at present menaced
with crusades by foreign invasion, or with seditions which shake the
foundations of the state at home. It is long since all this combination
of things has vanished from the view of intelligent observers. The
existence of quite another system of opinions and interests is now plain
to the grossest sense. Are these the questions that raise a flame in the
minds of men at this day? If ever the Church and the Constitution of
England should fall in these islands, (and they will fall together,) it
is not Presbyterian discipline nor Popish hierarchy that will rise upon
their ruins. It will not be the Church of Rome nor the Church of
Scotland, not the Church of Luther nor the Church of Calvin. On the
contrary, all these churches are menaced, and menaced alike. It is the
new fanatical religion, now in the heat of its first ferment, of the
Rights of Man, which rejects all establishments, all discipline, all
ecclesiastical, and in truth all civil order, which will triumph, and
which will lay prostrate your Church, which will destroy your
distinctions, and which will put all your properties to auction, and
disperse you over the earth. If the present establishment should fall,
it is this religion which will triumph in Ireland and in England, as it
has triumphed in France. This religion, which laughs at creeds and
dogmas and confessions of faith, may be fomented equally amongst all
descriptions and all sects,--amongst nominal Catholics, and amongst
nominal Churchmen, and amongst those Dissenters who know little and care
less about a presbytery, or any of its discipline, or any of its
doctrine. Against this new, this growing, this exterminatory system, all
these churches have a common concern to defend themselves. How the
enthusiasts of this rising sect rejoice to see you of the old churches
play their game, and stir and rake the cinders of animosities sunk in
their ashes, in order to keep up the execution of their plan for your
common ruin!
I suppress all that is in my mind about the blindness of those of our
clergy who will shut their eyes to a thing which glares in such manifest
day. If some wretches amongst an indigent and disorderly part of the
populace raise a riot about tithes, there are of these gentlemen ready
to cry out that this is an overt act of a treasonable conspiracy. Here
the bulls, and the pardons, and the crusade, and the Pope, and the
thunders of the Vatican are everywhere at work. There is a plot to bring
in a foreign power to destroy the Church. Alas! it is not about popes,
but about potatoes, that the minds of this unhappy people are agitated.
It is not from the spirit of zeal, but the spirit of whiskey, that these
wretches act. Is it, then, not conceived possible that a poor clown can
be unwilling, after paying three pounds rent to a gentleman in a brown
coat, to pay fourteen shillings to one in a black coat, for his acre of
potatoes, and tumultuously to desire some modification of the charge,
without being supposed to have no other motive than a frantic zeal for
being thus double-taxed to another set of landholders and another set of
priests? Have men no self-interest, no avarice, no repugnance to public
imposts? Have they no sturdy and restive minds, no undisciplined habits?
Is there nothing in the whole mob of irregular passions, which might
precipitate some of the common people, in some places, to quarrel with a
legal, because they feel it to be a burdensome imposition? According to
these gentlemen, no offence can be committed by Papists but from zeal to
their religion. To make room for the vices of Papists, they clear the
house of all the vices of men. Some of the common people (not one,
however, in ten thousand) commit disorders. Well! punish them as you do,
and as you ought to punish them, for their violence against the just
property of each individual clergyman, as each individual suffers.
Support the injured rector, or the injured impropriator, in the
enjoyment of the estate of which (whether on the best plan or not) the
laws have put him in possession. Let the crime and the punishment stand
upon their own bottom. But now we ought all of us, clergymen most
particularly, to avoid assigning another cause of quarrel, in order to
infuse a new source of bitterness into a dispute which personal feelings
on both sides will of themselves make bitter enough, and thereby involve
in it by religious descriptions men who have individually no share
whatsoever in those irregular acts. Let us not make the malignant
fictions of our own imaginations, heated with factious controversies,
reasons for keeping men that are neither guilty nor justly suspected of
crime in a servitude equally dishonorable and unsafe to religion and to
the state. When men are constantly accused, but know themselves not to
be guilty, they must naturally abhor their accusers. There is no
character, when malignantly taken up and deliberately pursued, which
more naturally excites indignation and abhorrence in mankind, especially
in that part of mankind which suffers from it.
I do not pretend to take pride in an extravagant attachment to any sect.
Some gentlemen in Ireland affect that sort of glory. It is to their
taste. Their piety, I take it for granted, justifies the fervor of their
zeal, and may palliate the excess of it. Being myself no more than a
common layman, commonly informed in controversies, leading only a very
common life, and having only a common citizen's interest in the Church
or in the State, yet to you I will say, in justice to my own sentiments,
that not one of those zealots for a Protestant interest wishes more
sincerely than I do, perhaps not half so sincerely, for the support of
the Established Church in both these kingdoms. It is a great link
towards holding fast the connection of religion with the State, and for
keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of
constitution, in a close connection of _opinion and affection_. I wish
it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary
land-proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of Church
and Stats, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be
firmly connected. I wish it well, because it is more closely combined
than any other of the church systems with the _crown_, which is the stay
of the mixed Constitution,--because it is, as things now stand, the sole
connecting _political_ principle between the constitutions of the two
independent kingdoms. I have another and infinitely a stronger reason
for wishing it well: it is, that in the present time I consider it as
one of the main pillars of the Christian religion itself. The body and
substance of every religion I regard much more than any of the forms and
dogmas of the particular sects. Its fall would leave a great void, which
nothing else, of which I can form any distinct idea, might fill. I
respect the Catholic hierarchy and the Presbyterian republic; but I
know that the hope or the fear of establishing either of them is, in
these kingdoms, equally chimerical, even if I preferred one or the other
of them to the Establishment, which certainly I do not.
These are some of my reasons for wishing the support of the Church of
Ireland as by law established. These reasons are founded as well on the
absolute as on the relative situation of that kingdom. But is it because
I love the Church, and the King, and the privileges of Parliament, that
I am to be ready for any violence, or any injustice, or any absurdity,
in the means of supporting any of these powers, or all of them together?
Instead of prating about Protestant ascendencies, Protestant Parliaments
ought, in my opinion, to think at last of becoming patriot Parliaments.
The legislature of Ireland, like all legislatures, ought to frame its
laws to suit the people and the circumstances of the country, and not
any longer to make it their whole business to force the nature, the
temper, and the inveterate habits of a nation to a conformity to
speculative systems concerning any kind of laws. Ireland has an
established government, and a religion legally established, which are to
be preserved. It has a people who are to be preserved too, and to be led
by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that
government. Ireland is a country under peculiar circumstances. The
people of Ireland are a very mixed people; and the quantities of the
several ingredients in the mixture are very much disproportioned to each
other. Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the
most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of
benevolent legislation? or are we not rather to provide for the several
parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the
heterogeneous nature of the mass? Would not common reason and common
honesty dictate to us the policy of regulating the people, in the
several descriptions of which they are composed, according to the
natural ranks and classes of an orderly civil society, under a common
protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favorable at once
to authority and to freedom,--such as the British Constitution boasts to
be, and such as it is to those who enjoy it?
You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of
the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not
the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which
consequently does not answer to _them_ any one purpose of a religious
establishment. This is a state of things which no man in his senses can
call perfectly happy. But it is the state of Ireland. Two hundred years
of experiment show it to be unalterable. Many a fierce struggle has
passed between the parties. The result is, you cannot make the people
Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government. This is
what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions
know. To-day the question is this: Are we to make the best of this
situation, which we cannot alter? The question is: Shall the condition
of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of
their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burdens of two
religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the
least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation,--or
shall it be aggravated, by stripping the people thus loaded of
everything which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as
to leave them naked of every sort of right and of every name of
franchise, to outlaw them from the Constitution, and to cut off
(perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to
property, or any other qualification, from all connection with the
popular representation, of the kingdom?
As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding. Liberty
is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is
pretended and assumed to destroy liberty. The Catholic religion is
completely free. It has no establishment,--but it is recognized,
permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws. If a man is
satisfied to be a slave, he may be a Papist with perfect impunity. He
may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as
an outlaw from the British Constitution. If the constitutional liberty
of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course
would be taken. The franchise would have been permitted, and the mass
exterminated. But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it
hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.
So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme
fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices,
by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times. Trusting wholly in
their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to
strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext
of the general good of the community. They say, that, if the people,
under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of
constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their
property. They tell us that they act only on the defensive. They inform
the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and
confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of people obtain
votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the
choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in
spite of the influence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed
interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole, or in far
the major part, of Papists; that this Popish House of Commons will
instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will not
be in their power to save even by entering into that Popish party
themselves, because there are prior claimants to be satisfied; that, as
to the House of Lords, though neither Papists nor Protestants have a
share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and
disinterested as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to
forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to
crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this
causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful Protestant
subjects; that they will be or are to be left, without house or land, to
the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are
already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation with which
they are threatened; that, therefore, they cannot so much as listen to
any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional
policy: the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door.
See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of
a sufficiently long perspective!
This is, indeed, to speak plain, though to speak nothing very new. The
same thing has been said in all times and in all languages. The language
of tyranny has been invariable: "The general good is inconsistent with
my personal safety." Justice and liberty seem so alarming to these
gentlemen, that they are not ashamed even to slander their own titles,
to calumniate and call in doubt their right to their own estates, and to
consider themselves as novel disseizors, usurpers, and intruders, rather
than lose a pretext for becoming oppressors of their fellow-citizens,
whom they (not I) choose to describe themselves as having robbed.
Instead of putting themselves in this odious point of light, one would
think they would wish to let Time draw his oblivious veil over the
unpleasant modes by which lordships and demesnes have been acquired in
theirs, and almost in all other countries upon earth. It might be
imagined, that, when the sufferer (if a sufferer exists) had forgot the
wrong, they would be pleased to forget it too,--that they would permit
the sacred name of possession to stand in the place of the melancholy
and unpleasant title of grantees of confiscation, which, though firm and
valid in law, surely merits the name that a great Roman jurist gave to a
title at least as valid in his nation as confiscation would be either in
his or in ours: _Tristis et luctuosa successio_.
Such is the situation of every man who comes in upon the ruin of
another; his succeeding, under this circumstance, is _tristis et
luctuosa successio_. If it had been the fate of any gentleman to profit
by the confiscation of his neighbor, one would think he would be more
disposed to give him a valuable interest under him in his land, or to
allow him a pension, as I understand one worthy person has done, without
fear or apprehension that his benevolence to a ruined family would be
construed into a recognition of the forfeited title. The public of
England, the other day, acted in this manner towards Lord Newburgh, a
Catholic. Though the estate had been vested by law in the greatest of
the public charities, they have given him a pension from his
confiscation. They have gone further in other cases. On the last
rebellion, in 1745, in Scotland, several forfeitures were incurred. They
had been disposed of by Parliament to certain laudable uses. Parliament
reversed the method which they had adopted in Lord Newburgh's case, and
in my opinion did better: they gave the forfeited estates to the
successors of the forfeiting proprietors, chargeable in part with the
uses. Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human
creature in Ireland? It is bounty, it is charity,--wise bounty, and
politic charity; but no man can claim it as a right. Here no such thing
is claimed as right, or begged as charity. The demand has an object as
distant from all considerations of this sort as any two extremes can be.
The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna
Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the
fruits of their industry. They call for no man's estate; they desire not
to be dispossessed of their own.
But this melancholy and invidious title is a favorite (and, like
favorites, always of the least merit) with those who possess every other
title upon earth along with it. For this purpose they revive the bitter
memory of every dissension which has torn to pieces their miserable
country for ages. After what has passed in 1782, one would not think
that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by
magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible
confiscatory and exterminatory periods. They would not set men upon
calling from the quiet sleep of death any Samuel, to ask him by what act
of arbitrary monarchs, by what inquisitions of corrupted tribunals and
tortured jurors, by what fictitious tenures invented to dispossess whole
unoffending tribes and their chieftains. They would not conjure up the
ghosts from the ruins of castles and churches, to tell for what attempt
to struggle for the independence of an Irish legislature, and to raise
armies of volunteers without regular commissions from the crown in
support of that independence, the estates of the old Irish nobility and
gentry had been confiscated. They would not wantonly call on those
phantoms to tell by what English acts of Parliament, forced upon two
reluctant kings, the lands of their country were put up to a mean and
scandalous auction in every goldsmith's shop in London, or chopped to
pieces and out into rations, to pay the mercenary soldiery of a regicide
usurper. They would not be so fond of titles under Cromwell, who, if he
avenged an Irish rebellion against the sovereign authority of the
Parliament of England, had himself rebelled against the very Parliament
whose sovereignty he asserted, full as much as the Irish nation, which
he was sent to subdue and confiscate, could rebel against that
Parliament, or could rebel against the king, against whom both he and
the Parliament which he served, and which he betrayed, had both of them
rebelled.
The gentlemen who hold the language of the day know perfectly well that
the Irish in 1641 pretended, at least, that they did not rise against
the king: nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put
upon their act. But full surely they rebelled against the authority of
the Parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do. Admitting
(I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable
magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in
those of their children and their grandchildren, even to the fifth and
sixth generations. Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural
rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that
it must be avenged forever? Will it follow that it must be avenged on
thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of those whom they can never
trace, by the labors of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction
of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the
descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion
against the Parliament of England?
If, however, you could find out those pedigrees of guilt, I do not think
the difference would be essential. History records many things which
ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor
policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson
does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson
us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when
we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To
that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They
ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations
which formerly inflamed the furious factions which had torn their
country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and
abominable things which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured,
robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly
revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully
exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years
after, to find some color for justifying them in the eternal
proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.
Let us come to a later period of those confiscations with the memory of
which the gentlemen who triumph in the acts of 1782 are so much
delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in
1688, and the English Parliament again put up to sale the greatest part
of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this
rebellion, nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation.
The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw
himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their
feeble power. Be the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated
sovereign, against a prince whom the Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland
had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion
more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them.
In generous minds some small degree of compassion might be excited for
an error, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a conqueror, _quadam
specie et similitudine pacis_, not without a mistaken appearance of
duty, and for which the guilty have suffered, by exile abroad and
slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best
calculators compute that Ireland lost two hundred thousand of her
inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and
Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am
it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For, if
the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same
principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish
Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of
rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked,
not for any designs against _their_ religion or _their_ liberties, but
for an extreme partiality for their sect, and who, far from trespassing
on _their_ liberties and properties, secured both them and the
independence of their country in much the same manner that we have seen
the same things done at the period of 1782,--I trust the last revolution
in Ireland.
That the Irish Parliament of King James did in some particulars, though
feebly, imitate the rigor which had been used towards the Irish, is true
enough. Blamable enough they were for what they had done, though under
the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or
counter-confiscations as long as I live. When they happen by necessity,
I shall think the necessity lamentable and odious: I shall think that
anything done under it ought not to pass into precedent, or to be
adopted by choice, or to produce any of those shocking retaliations
which never suffer dissensions to subside. Least of all would I fix the
transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodizing it in
tyrannic government. If it were permitted to argue with power, might one
not ask these gentlemen whether it would not be more natural, instead of
wantonly mooting these questions concerning their property, as if it
were an exercise in law, to found it on the solid rock of
prescription,--the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized
title between man and man that is known in municipal or in public
jurisprudence?--a title in which not arbitrary institutions, but the
eternal order of things, gives judgment; a title which is not the
creature, but the master, of positive law; a title which, though not
fixed in its term, is rooted in its principle in the law of Nature
itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property: for all
property in soil will always be traced back to that source, and will
rest there. The miserable natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an
hundred are tormented with quite other cares, and are bowed down to
labor for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding
with antiquaries for titles of centuries ago to the estates of the great
lords and squires for whom they labor. But if they were thinking of the
titles which gentlemen labor to beat into their heads, where can they
bottom their own claims, but in a presumption and a proof that these
lands had at some time been possessed by their ancestors? These
gentlemen (for they have lawyers amongst them) know as well as I that in
England we have had always a prescription or limitation, as all nations
have, against each other. The crown was excepted; but that exception is
destroyed, and we have lately established a sixty years' possession as
against the crown. All titles terminate in prescription,--in which
(differently from Time in the fabulous instances) the son devours the
father, and the last prescription eats up all the former.
* * * * *
A
LETTER
ON
THE AFFAIRS OF IRELAND.
1797.
Dear Sir,--In the reduced state of body and in the dejected state of
mind in which I find myself at this very advanced period of my life, it
is a great consolation to me to know that a cause I ever have had so
very near my heart is taken up by a man of your activity and talents.
It is very true that your late friend, my ever dear and honored son, was
in the highest degree solicitous about the final event of a business
which he also had pursued for a long time with infinite zeal, and no
small degree of success. It was not above half an hour before he left me
forever that he spoke with considerable earnestness on this very
subject. If I had needed any incentives to do my best for freeing the
body of my country from the grievances under which they labor, this
alone would certainly call forth all my endeavors.
The person who succeeded to the government of Ireland about the time of
that afflicting event had been all along of my sentiments and yours upon
this subject; and far from needing to be stimulated by me, that
incomparable person, and those in whom he strictly confided, even went
before me in their resolution to pursue the great end of government, the
satisfaction and concord of the people with whose welfare they were
charged. I cannot bear to think on the causes by which this great plan
of policy, so manifestly beneficial to both kingdoms, has been
defeated.
Your mistake with regard to me lies in supposing that I did not, when
his removal was in agitation, strongly and personally represent to
several of his Majesty's ministers, to whom I could have the most ready
access, the true state of Ireland, and the mischiefs which sooner or
later must arise from subjecting the mass of the people to the
capricious and interested domination of an exceeding small faction and
its dependencies.
That representation was made the last time, or very nearly the last
time, that I have ever had the honor of seeing those ministers. I am so
far from having any credit with them, on this, or any other public
matters, that I have reason to be certain, if it were known that any
person in office in Ireland, from the highest to the lowest, were
influenced by my opinions, and disposed to act upon them, such an one
would be instantly turned out of his employment. Yon have formed, to my
person a flattering, yet in truth a very erroneous opinion, of my power
with those who direct the public measures. I never have been directly or
indirectly consulted about anything that is done. The judgment of the
eminent and able persons who conduct public affairs is undoubtedly
superior to mine; but self-partiality induces almost every man to defer
something to his own. Nothing is more notorious than that I have the
misfortune of thinking that no one capital measure relative to political
arrangements, and still less that a new military plan for the defence of
either kingdom in this arduous war, has been taken upon any other
principle than such as must conduct us to inevitable ruin.
In the state of my mind, so discordant with the tone of ministers, and
still more discordant with the tone of opposition, you may judge what
degree of weight I am likely to have with either of the parties who
divide this kingdom,--even though I were endowed with strength of body,
or were possessed of any active situation in the government, which might
give success to my endeavors. But the fact is, since the day of my
unspeakable calamity, except in the attentions of a very few old and
compassionate friends, I am totally out of all social intercourse. My
health has gone down very rapidly; and I have been brought hither with
very faint hopes of life, and enfeebled to such a degree as those who
had known me some time ago could scarcely think credible. Since I came
hither, my sufferings have been greatly aggravated, and my little
strength still further reduced; so that, though I am told the symptoms
of my disorder begin to carry a more favorable aspect, I pass the far
larger part of the twenty-four hours, indeed almost the whole, either in
my bed or lying upon the couch from which I dictate this. Had you been
apprised of this circumstance, you could not have expected anything, as
you seem to do, from my active exertions. I could do nothing, if I was
still stronger, not even _si meus adforet Hector_.
There is no hope for the body of the people of Ireland, as long as those
who are in power with you shall make it the great object of their policy
to propagate an opinion on this side of the water that the mass of their
countrymen are not to be trusted by their government, and that the only
hold which England has upon Ireland consists in preserving a certain
very small number of gentlemen in full possession of a monopoly of that
kingdom. This system has disgusted many others besides Catholics and
Dissenters.
As to those who on your side are in the opposition to government, they
are composed of persons several of whom I love and revere. They have
been irritated by a treatment too much for the ordinary patience of
mankind to bear into the adoption of schemes which, however
_argumentatively_ specious, would go _practically_ to the inevitable
ruin of the kingdom. The opposition always connects the emancipation of
the Catholics with these schemes of reformation: indeed, it makes the
former only a member of the latter project. The gentlemen who enforce
that opposition are, in my opinion, playing the game of their
adversaries with all their might; and there is no third party in Ireland
(nor in England neither) to separate things that are in themselves so
distinct,--I mean the admitting people to the benefits of the
Constitution, and a change in the form of the Constitution itself.
As every one knows that a great part of the constitution of the Irish
House of Commons was formed about the year 1614 expressly for bringing
that House into a state of dependence, and that the new representative
was at that time seated and installed by force and violence, nothing can
be more impolitic than for those who wish the House to stand on its
present basis (as, for one, I most sincerely do) to make it appear to
have kept too much the principle of its first institution, and to
continue to be as little a virtual as it is an actual representative of
the commons. It is the _degeneracy_ of such an institution, _so vicious
in its principle_, that is to be wished for. If men have the real
benefit of a _sympathetic_ representation, none but those who are heated
and intoxicated with theory will look for any other. This sort of
representation, my dear Sir, must wholly depend, not on the force with
which it is upheld, but upon the _prudence_ of those who have influence
upon it. Indeed, without some such prudence in the use of authority, I
do not know, at least in the present time, how any power can long
continue.
If it be true that both parties are carrying things to extremities in
different ways, the object which you and I have in common, that is to
say, the union and concord of our country _on the basis of the actual
representation_, without risking those evils which any change in the
form of our legislature must inevitably bring on, can never be obtained.
On the part of the Catholics (that is to say, of the body of the people
of the kingdom) it is a terrible alternative, either to submit to the
yoke of declared and insulting enemies, or to seek a remedy in plunging
themselves into the horrors and crimes of that Jacobinism which
unfortunately is not disagreeable to the principles and inclinations of,
I am afraid, the majority of what we call the Protestants of Ireland.
The Protestant part of that kingdom is represented by the government
itself to be, by whole counties, in nothing less than open rebellion. I
am sure that it is everywhere teeming with dangerous conspiracy.
I believe it will be found, that, though the principles of the
Catholics, and the incessant endeavors of their clergy, have kept them
from being generally infected with the systems of this time, yet,
whenever their situation brings them nearer into contact with the
Jacobin Protestants, they are more or less infected with their
doctrines.
It is a matter for melancholy reflection, but I am fully convinced, that
many persons in Ireland would be glad that the Catholics should become
more and more infected with the Jacobin madness, in order to furnish new
arguments for fortifying them in their monopoly. On any other ground it
is impossible to account for the late language of your men in power. If
statesmen, (let me suppose for argument,) upon the most solid political
principles, conceive themselves obliged to resist the wishes of the far
more numerous, and, as things stand, not the worse part of the
community, one would think they would naturally put their refusal as
much as possible upon temporary grounds, and that they would act towards
them in the most conciliatory manner, and would talk to them in the most
gentle and soothing language: for refusal, in itself, is not a very
gracious thing; and, unfortunately, men are very quickly irritated out
of their principles. Nothing is more discouraging to the loyalty of any
description of men than to represent to them that their humiliation and
subjection make a principal part in the fundamental and invariable
policy which regards the conjunction of these two kingdoms. This is not
the way to give them a warm interest in that conjunction.
My poor opinion is, that the closest connection between Great Britain
and Ireland is essential to the well-being, I had almost said, to the
very being, of the two kingdoms. For that purpose I humbly conceive that
the whole of the superior, and what I should call _imperial_ politics,
ought to have its residence here; and that Ireland, locally, civilly,
and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great
Britain in all matters of peace or of war,--in all those points to be
guided by her.--and, in a word, with her to live and to die. At bottom,
Ireland has no other choice,--I mean, no other rational choice.
I think, indeed, that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of
Ireland; but as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most
heavily on Ireland. By such a separation Ireland would be the most
completely undone country in the world,--the most wretched, the most
distracted, and, in the end, the most desolate part of the habitable
globe. Little do many people in Ireland consider how much of its
prosperity has been owing to, and still depends upon, its intimate
connection with this kingdom. But, more sensible of this great truth,
than perhaps any other man, I have never conceived, or can conceive,
that the connection is strengthened by making the major part of the
inhabitants of your country believe that their ease, and their
satisfaction, and their equalization with the rest of their
fellow-subjects of Ireland are things adverse to the principles of that
connection,--or that their subjection to a small monopolizing junto,
composed of one of the smallest of their own internal factions, is the
very condition upon which the harmony of the two kingdoms essentially
depends. I was sorry to hear that this principle, or something not
unlike it, was publicly and fully avowed by persons of great rank and
authority in the House of Lords in Ireland.
As to a participation on the part of the Catholics in the privileges and
capacities which are withheld, without meaning wholly to depreciate
their importance, if I had the honor of being an Irish Catholic, I
should be content to expect satisfaction upon that subject with
patience, until the minds of my adversaries, few, but powerful, were
come to a proper temper: because, if the Catholics did enjoy, without
fraud, chicane, or partiality, some fair portion of those advantages
which the law, even as now the law is, leaves open to them, and if the
rod were not shaken over them at every turn, their present condition
would be tolerable; as compared with their former condition, it would be
happy. But the most favorable laws can do very little towards the
happiness of a people, when the disposition of the ruling power is
adverse to them. Men do not live upon blotted paper. The favorable or
the hostile mind of the ruling power is of far more importance to
mankind, for good or evil, than the black-letter of any statute. Late
acts of Parliament, whilst they fixed at least a temporary bar to the
hopes and progress of the larger description of the nation, opened to
them certain subordinate objects of equality; but it is impossible that
the people should imagine that any fair measure of advantage is intended
to them, when they hear the laws by which they were admitted to this
limited qualification publicly reprobated as excessive and
inconsiderate. They must think that there is a hankering after the old
penal and persecuting code. Their alarm must be great, when that
declaration is made by a person in very high and important office in the
House of Commons, and as the very first specimen and auspice of a new
government.
All this is very unfortunate. I have the honor of an old acquaintance,
and entertain, in common with you, a very high esteem for the few
English persons who are concerned in the government of Ireland; but I am
not ignorant of the relation these transitory ministers bear to the
more settled Irish part of your administration. It is a delicate topic,
upon which I wish to say but little, though my reflections upon it are
many and serious. There is a great cry against English influence. I am
quite sure that it is Irish influence that dreads the English habits.
Great disorders have long prevailed in Ireland. It is not long since
that the Catholics were the suffering party from those disorders. I am
sure they were not protected as the case required. Their sufferings
became a matter of discussion in Parliament. It produced the most
infuriated declamation against them that I have ever read. An inquiry
was moved into the facts. The declamation was at least tolerated, if not
approved. The inquiry was absolutely rejected. In that case, what is
left for those who are abandoned by government, but to join with the
persons who are capable of injuring them or protecting them as they
oppose or concur in their designs? This will produce a very fatal kind
of union amongst the people; but it is an union, which an unequal
administration of justice tends necessarily to produce.
If anything could astonish one at this time, it is the war that the
rulers in Ireland think it proper to carry on against the person whom
they call the Pope, and against all his adherents, whenever they think
they have the power of manifesting their hostility. Without in the least
derogating from the talents of your theological politicians, or from the
military abilities of your commanders (who act on the same principles)
in Ireland, and without derogating from the zeal of either, it appears
to me that the Protestant Directory of Paris, as statesmen, and the
Protestant hero, Buonaparte, as a general, have done more to destroy
the said Pope and all his adherents, in all their capacities, than the
junto in Ireland have ever been able to effect. You must submit your
_fasces_ to theirs, and at best be contented to follow with songs of
gratulation, or invectives, according to your humor, the triumphal car
of those great conquerors. Had that true Protestant, Hoche, with an army
not infected with the slightest tincture of Popery, made good his
landing in Ireland, he would have saved you from a great deal of the
trouble which is taken to keep under a description of your
fellow-citizens obnoxious to you from their religion. It would not have
a month's existence, supposing his success. This is the alliance which,
under the appearance of hostility, we act as if we wished to promote.
All is well, provided we are safe from Popery.
It was not necessary for you, my dear Sir, to explain yourself to _me_
(in justification of your good wishes to your fellow-citizens)
concerning your total alienation from the principles of the Catholics. I
am more concerned in what we agree than in what we differ. You know the
impossibility of our forming any judgment upon the opinions, religious,
moral, or political, of those who in the largest sense are called
Protestants,--at least, as these opinions and tenets form a
qualification for holding any civil, judicial, military, or even
ecclesiastical situation. I have no doubt of the orthodox opinion of
many, both of the clergy and laity, professing the established religion
in Ireland, and of many even amongst the Dissenters, relative to the
great points of the Christian faith: but that orthodoxy concerns them
only as _individuals_. As a _qualification_ for employment, we all know
that in Ireland it is not necessary that they should profess any
religion at all: so that the war that we make is upon certain
theological tenets, about which scholastic disputes are carried on _æquo
Marte_, by controvertists, on their side, as able and as learned, and
perhaps as well-intentioned, as those are who fight the battle on the
other part. To them I would leave those controversies. I would turn my
mind to what is more within its competence, and has been more my study,
(though, for a man of the world, I have thought of those things,)--I
mean, the moral, civil, and political good of the countries we belong
to, and in which God has appointed your station and mine. Let every man
be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is
agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner
of civil privileges and advantages to a _negative_ religion, (such is
the Protestant without a certain creed,) and at the same time to deny
those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one
_positive_ doctrine which all of us who profess the religion
authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our
faculties, bound to believe. The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said)
have the whole of our _positive_ religion: our difference is only a
negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of _that_
part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that
holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which
you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we better than to
hold out to them terrors on the one side, and bounties on the other, in
favor of that which, for anything we know to the contrary, may be pure
atheism?
You are well aware, that, when a man renounces the Roman religion,
there is no civil inconvenience or incapacity whatsoever which shall
hinder him from joining any new or old sect of Dissenters, or of forming
a sect of his own invention upon the most anti-christian principles. Let
Mr. Thomas Paine obtain a pardon, (as on change of ministry he may,)
there is nothing to hinder him from setting up a church of his own in
the very midst of you. He is a natural-born British subject. His French
citizenship does not disqualify him, at least upon a peace. This
Protestant apostle is as much above all suspicion of Popery as the
greatest and most zealous of your sanhedrim in Ireland can possibly be.
On purchasing a qualification, (which his friends of the Directory are
not so poor as to be unable to effect,) he may sit in Parliament; and
there is no doubt that there is not one of your tests against Popery
that he will not take as fairly, and as much _ex animo_, as the best of
your zealot statesmen. I push this point no further, and only adduce
this example (a pretty strong one, and fully in point) to show what I
take to be the madness and folly of driving men, under the existing
circumstances, from any _positive_ religion whatever into the irreligion
of the times, and its sure concomitant principles of anarchy.
When religion is brought into a question of civil and political
arrangement, it must be considered more politically than theologically,
at least by us, who are nothing more than mere laymen. In that light,
the case of the Catholics of Ireland is peculiarly hard, whether they be
laity or clergy. If any of them take part, like the gentleman you
mention, with some of the most accredited Protestants of the country, in
projects which cannot be more abhorrent to your nature and disposition
than they are to mine,--in that case, however few these Catholic
factions who are united with factious Protestants may be, (and very few
they are now, whatever shortly they may become,) on their account the
whole body is considered as of suspected fidelity to the crown, and as
wholly undeserving of its favor. But if, on the contrary, in those
districts of the kingdom where their numbers are the greatest, where
they make, in a manner, the whole body of the people, (as, out of
cities, in three fourths of the kingdom they do,) these Catholics show
every mark of loyalty and zeal in support of the government, which at
best looks on them with an evil eye, then their very loyalty is turned
against their claims. They are represented as a contented and happy
people, and that it is unnecessary to do anything more in their favor.
Thus the factious disposition of a few among the Catholics and the
loyalty of the whole mass are equally assigned as reasons for not
putting them on a par with those Protestants who are asserted by the
government itself, which frowns upon Papists, to be in a state of
nothing short of actual rebellion, and in a strong disposition to make
common cause with the worst foreign enemy that these countries have ever
had to deal with. What in the end can come of all this?
As to the Irish Catholic clergy, their condition is likewise most
critical. If they endeavor by their influence to keep a dissatisfied
laity in quiet, they are in danger of losing the little credit they
possess, by being considered as the instruments of a government adverse
to the civil interests of their flock. If they let things take their
course, they will be represented as colluding with sedition, or at least
tacitly encouraging it. If they remonstrate against persecution, they
propagate rebellion. Whilst government publicly avows hostility to that
people, as a part of a regular system, there is no road they can take
which does not lead to their ruin.
If nothing can be done on your side of the water, I promise you that
nothing will be done here. Whether in reality or only in appearance I
cannot positively determine, but you will be left to yourselves by the
ruling powers here. It is thus ostensibly and above-board; and in part,
I believe, the disposition is real. As to the people at large in this
country, I am sure they have no disposition to intermeddle in your
affairs. They mean you no ill whatever; and they are too ignorant of the
state of your affairs to be able to do you any good. Whatever opinion
they have on your subject is very faint and indistinct; and if there is
anything like a formed notion, even that amounts to no more than a sort
of humming that remains on their ears of the burden of the old song
about Popery. Poor souls, they are to be pitied, who think of nothing
but dangers long passed by, and but little of the perils that actually
surround them.
* * * * *
I have been long, but it is almost a necessary consequence of dictating,
and that by snatches, as a relief from pain gives me the means of
expressing my sentiments. They can have little weight, as coming from
me; and I have not power enough of mind or body to bring them out with
their natural force. But I do not wish to have it concealed that I am of
the same opinion, to my last breath, which I entertained when my
faculties were at the best; and I have not held back from men in power
in this kingdom, to whom I have very good wishes, any part of my
sentiments on this melancholy subject, so long as I had means of access
to persons of their consideration.
I have the honor to be, &c.
END OF VOL. VI.