The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Volume IV Part 13

THE ROMAN CATHOLICS OF IRELAND,

THE PROPRIETY OF ADMITTING THEM TO THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE, CONSISTENTLY WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CONSt.i.tUTION, AS ESTABLISHED AT THE REVOLUTION.

1792.

My Dear Sir,--Your remembrance of me, with sentiments of so much kindness, has given me the most sincere satisfaction. It perfectly agrees with the friendly and hospitable reception which my son and I received from you some time since, when, after an absence of twenty-two years, I had the happiness of embracing you, among my few surviving friends.

I really imagined that I should not again interest myself in any public business. I had, to the best of my moderate faculties, paid my club to the society which I was born in some way or other to serve; and I thought I had a right to put on my night-gown and slippers, and wish a cheerful evening to the good company I must leave behind. But if our resolutions of vigor and exertion are so often broken or procrastinated in the execution, I think we may be excused, if we are not very punctual in fulfilling our engagements to indolence and inactivity. I have, indeed, no power of action, and am almost a cripple even with regard to thinking; but you descend with force into the stagnant pool, and you cause such a fermentation as to cure at least one impotent creature of his lameness, though it cannot enable him either to run or to wrestle.

You see by the paper[28] I take that I am likely to be long, with malice prepense. You have brought under my view a subject always difficult, at present critical. It has filled my thoughts, which I wish to lay open to you with the clearness and simplicity which your friendship demands from me. I thank you for the communication of your ideas. I should be still more pleased, if they had been more your own. What you hint I believe to be the case: that, if you had not deferred to the judgment of others, our opinions would not differ more materially at this day than they did when we used to confer on the same subject so many years ago. If I still persevere in my old opinions, it is no small comfort to me that it is not with regard to doctrines properly yours that I discover my indocility.

The case upon which your letter of the 10th of December turns is hardly before me with precision enough to enable me to form any very certain judgment upon it. It seems to be some plan of further indulgence proposed for the Catholics of Ireland. You observe, that your "general principles are not changed, but that _times and circ.u.mstances are altered_." I perfectly agree with you, that times and circ.u.mstances, considered with reference to the public, ought very much to govern our conduct,--though I am far from slighting, when applied with discretion to those circ.u.mstances, general principles and maxims of policy. I cannot help observing, however, that you have said rather less upon the inapplicability of your own old principles to the _circ.u.mstances_ that are likely to influence your conduct against these principles than of the _general_ maxims of state, which I can very readily believe not to have great weight with you personally.

In my present state of imperfect information, you will pardon the errors into which I may easily fall. The principles you lay down are, "that the Roman Catholics should enjoy everything _under_ the state, but should not be _the state itself_." And you add, "that, when you exclude them from being _a part of the state_, you rather conform to the spirit of the age than to any abstract doctrine"; but you consider the Const.i.tution as already established,--that our state is Protestant. "It was declared so at the Revolution. It was so provided in the acts for settling the succession of the crown:--the king's coronation oath was enjoined in order to keep it so. The king, as first magistrate of the state, is obliged to take the oath of abjuration,[29] and to subscribe the Declaration; and by laws subsequent, every other magistrate and member of the state, legislative and executive, are bound under the same obligation."

As to the plan to which these maxims are applied, I cannot speak, as I told you, positively about it: because neither from your letter, nor from any in formation I have been able to collect, do I find anything settled, either on the part of the Roman Catholics themselves, or on that of any persons who may wish to conduct their affairs in Parliament.

But if I have leave to conjecture, something is in agitation towards admitting them, under _certain qualifications_, to have _some share_ in the election of members of Parliament. This I understand is the scheme of those who are ent.i.tled to come within your description of persons of consideration, property, and character,--and firmly attached to the king and Const.i.tution, as by "law established, with a grateful sense of your former concessions, and a patient reliance on the benignity of Parliament for the further mitigation of the laws that still affect them."--As to the low, thoughtless, wild, and profligate, who have joined themselves with those of other professions, but of the same character, you are not to imagine that for a moment I can suppose them to be met with anything else than the manly and enlightened energy of a firm government, supported by the united efforts of all virtuous men, if ever their proceedings should become so considerable as to demand its notice. I really think that such a.s.sociations should be crushed in their very commencement.

Setting, therefore, this case out of the question, it becomes an object of very serious consideration, whether, because wicked men of _various_ descriptions are engaged in seditious courses, the rational, sober, and valuable part of _one_ description should not be indulged in their sober and rational expectations. You, who have looked deeply into the spirit of the Popery laws, must be perfectly sensible that a great part of the present mischief which we abhor in common (if it at all exists) has arisen from them. Their declared object was, to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education. The professed object was, to deprive the few men, who, in spite of those laws, might hold or obtain any property amongst them, of all sort of influence or authority over the rest. They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy, or connection. One of these bodies was to possess _all_ the franchises, _all_ the property, _all_ the education: the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. Are we to be astonished, when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation, continued without intermission for near an hundred years, we had reduced them to a mob, that, whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight? Surely it might be just now a matter of temperate discussion, whether you ought not to apply a remedy to the real cause of the evil.

If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristocratic interest, that is, an interest of property and education, amongst them,--and to strengthen, by every prudent means, the authority and influence of men of that description. It will deserve your best thoughts, to examine whether this can be done without giving such persons the means of demonstrating to the rest that something more is to be got by their temperate conduct than can be expected from the wild and senseless projects of those who do not belong to their body, who have no interest in their well-being, and only wish to make them the dupes of their turbulent ambition.

If the absurd persons you mention find no way of providing for liberty, but by overturning this happy Const.i.tution, and introducing a frantic democracy, let us take care how we prevent better people from any rational expectations of partaking in the benefits of that Const.i.tution _as it stands_. The maxims you establish cut the matter short. They have no sort of connection with the good or the ill behavior of the persons who seek relief, or with the proper or improper means by which they seek it. They form a perpetual bar to all pleas and to all expectations.

You begin by a.s.serting, that "the Catholics ought to enjoy all things _under_ the state, but that they ought not to _be the state_": a position which, I believe, in the latter part of it, and in the lat.i.tude there expressed, no man of common sense has ever thought proper to dispute; because the contrary implies that the state ought to be in them _exclusively_. But before you have finished the line, you express yourself as if the other member of your proposition, namely, that "they ought not to be a _part_ of the state," were necessarily included in the first,--whereas I conceive it to be as different as a part is from the whole, that is, just as different as possible. I know, indeed, that it is common with those who talk very differently from you, that is, with heat and animosity, to confound those things, and to argue the admission of the Catholics into any, however minute and subordinate, parts of the state, as a surrender into their hands of the whole government of the kingdom. To them I have nothing at all to say.

Wishing to proceed with a deliberative spirit and temper in so very serious a question, I shall attempt to a.n.a.lyze, as well as I can, the principles you lay down, in order to fit them for the grasp of an understanding so little comprehensive as mine.--"State,"--"Protestant,"--"Revolution." These are terms which, if not well explained, may lead us into many errors. In the word _State_ I conceive there is much ambiguity. The state is sometimes used to signify _the whole commonwealth_, comprehending all its orders, with the several privileges belonging to each. Sometimes it signifies only _the higher and ruling part_ of the commonwealth, which we commonly call _the Government_. In the first sense, to be under the state, but not the state itself, _nor any part of it_, that is, to be nothing at all in the commonwealth, is a situation perfectly intelligible,--but to those who fill that situation, not very pleasant, when it is understood. It is a state of _civil servitude_, by the very force of the definition.

_Servorum non est respublica_ is a very old and a very true maxim. This servitude, which makes men _subject_ to a state without being _citizens_, may be more or less tolerable from many circ.u.mstances; but these circ.u.mstances, more or less favorable, do not alter the nature of the thing. The mildness by which absolute masters exercise their dominion leaves them masters still. We may talk a little presently of the manner in which the majority of the people of Ireland (the Catholics) are affected by this situation, which at present undoubtedly is theirs, and which you are of opinion ought so to continue forever.

In the other sense of the word _State_, by which is understood the _Supreme Government_ only, I must observe this upon the question: that to exclude whole cla.s.ses of men entirely from this _part_ of government cannot be considered as _absolute slavery_. It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship: such is (with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries in which an hereditary n.o.bility possess the exclusive rule. This may be no bad mode of government,--provided that the personal authority of individual n.o.bles be kept in due bounds, that their cabals and factions are guarded against with a severe vigilance, and that the people (who have no share in granting their own money) are subjected to but light impositions, and are otherwise treated with attention, and with indulgence to their humors and prejudices.

The republic of Venice is one of those which strictly confines all the great functions and offices, such as are truly _stale_ functions and _state_ offices, to those who by hereditary right or admission are n.o.ble Venetians. But there are many offices, and some of them not mean nor unprofitable, (that of Chancellor is one,) which are reserved for the _cittadini_. Of these all citizens of Venice are capable. The inhabitants of the _terra firma_, who are mere subjects of conquest, that is, as you express it, under the state, but "not a part of it," are not, however, subjects in so very rigorous a sense as not to be capable of numberless subordinate employments. It is, indeed, one of the advantages attending the narrow bottom of their aristocracy, (narrow as compared with their acquired dominions, otherwise broad enough,) that an exclusion from such employments cannot possibly be made amongst their subjects. There are, besides, advantages in states so const.i.tuted, by which those who are considered as of an inferior race are indemnified for their exclusion from the government, and from n.o.bler employments. In all these countries, either by express law, or by usage more operative, the n.o.ble castes are almost universally, in their turn, excluded from commerce, manufacture, farming of land, and in general from all lucrative civil professions. The n.o.bles have the monopoly of honor; the plebeians a monopoly of all the means of acquiring wealth. Thus some sort of a balance is formed among conditions; a sort of compensation is furnished to those who, in a _limited sense_, are excluded from the government of the state.

Between the extreme of _a total exclusion_, to which your maxim goes, and _an universal unmodified capacity_, to which the fanatics pretend, there are many different degrees and stages, and a great variety of temperaments, upon which prudence may give full scope to its exertions.

For you know that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.

In all considerations which turn upon the question of vesting or continuing the state solely and exclusively in some one description of citizens, prudent legislators will consider how far _the general form and principles of their commonwealth render it fit to be cast into an oligarchical shape, or to remain always in it_. We know that the government of Ireland (the same as the British) is not in its const.i.tution _wholly_ aristocratical; and as it is not such in its form, so neither is it in its spirit. If it had been inveterately aristocratical, exclusions might be more patiently submitted to. The lot of one plebeian would be the lot of all; and an habitual reverence and admiration of certain families might make the people content to see government wholly in hands to whom it seemed naturally to belong. But our Const.i.tution has _a plebeian member_, which forms an essential integrant part of it. A plebeian oligarchy is a monster; and no people, not absolutely domestic or predial slaves, will long endure it. The Protestants of Ireland are not _alone_ sufficiently the people to form a democracy; and they are _too numerous_ to answer the ends and purposes of _an aristocracy_. Admiration, that first source of obedience, can be only the claim or the imposture of the few. I hold it to be absolutely impossible for two millions of plebeians, composing certainly a very clear and decided majority in that cla.s.s, to become so far in love with six or seven hundred thousand of their fellow-citizens (to all outward appearance plebeians like themselves, and many of them tradesmen, servants, and otherwise inferior to some of them) as to see with satisfaction, or even with patience, an exclusive power vested in them, by which _const.i.tutionally_ they become the absolute masters, and, by the _manners_ derived from their circ.u.mstances, must be capable of exercising upon them, daily and hourly, an insulting and vexatious superiority. Neither are the majority of the Irish indemnified (as in some aristocracies) for this state of humiliating va.s.salage (often inverting the nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life; while every franchise, every honor, every trust, every place, down to the very lowest and least confidential, (besides whole professions,) is reserved for the master caste.

Our Const.i.tution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the Const.i.tution. In our Const.i.tution there has always been a difference between _a franchise_ and _an office_, and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the _subject_, as _a subject_, and not as _a member of the governing part of the state_. The policy of government has considered them as things very different; for, whilst Parliament excluded by the test acts (and for a while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in England) Protestant Dissenters from all civil and military employments, they _never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament or sitting in either House_: a point I state, not as approving or condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in reason.

I will not here examine whether the principles of the British [the Irish] Const.i.tution be wise or not. I must a.s.sume that they are, and that those who partake the franchises which make it partake of a benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications inherent in the Const.i.tution that gives them) are excluded, not from _the state_, but from _the British Const.i.tution_. They cannot by any possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so bravely made by those who possess the privilege, that the best blood in their veins ought to be shed to preserve their share in it,--they, the disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think themselves in an _happy_ state, to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential advantages. The popular part of the Const.i.tution must be to them by far the most odious part of it. To them it is not an _actual_, and, if possible, still less a _virtual_ representation. It is, indeed, the direct contrary. It is power unlimited placed in the hands of _an adverse_ description _because it is an adverse description_. And if they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, pa.s.sion, petulance, peevish jealousy, or tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigor.

This is not a mere theory; though, whilst men are men, it is a theory that cannot be false. I do not desire to revive all the particulars in my memory; I wish them to sleep forever; but it is impossible I should wholly forget what happened in some parts of Ireland, with very few and short intermissions, from the year 1761 to the year 1766, both inclusive. In a country of miserable police, pa.s.sing from the extremes of laxity to the extremes of rigor, among a neglected and therefore disorderly populace, if any disturbance or sedition, from any grievance real or imaginary, happened to arise, it was presently perverted from its true nature, often criminal enough in itself to draw upon it a severe, appropriate punishment: it was metamorphosed into a conspiracy against the state, and prosecuted as such. Amongst the Catholics, as being by far the most numerous and the most wretched, all sorts of offenders against the laws must commonly be found. The punishment of low people for the offences usual among low people would warrant no inference against any descriptions of religion or of politics. Men of consideration from their age, their profession, or their character, men of proprietary landed estates, substantial renters, opulent merchants, physicians, and t.i.tular bishops, could not easily be suspected of riot in open day, or of nocturnal a.s.semblies for the purpose of pulling down hedges, making breaches in park-walls, firing barns, maiming cattle, and outrages of a similar nature, which characterize the disorders of an oppressed or a licentious populace. But when the evidence given on the trial for such misdemeanors qualified them as overt acts of high treason, and when witnesses were found (such witnesses as they were) to depose to the taking of oaths of allegiance by the rioters to the king of France, to their being paid by his money, and embodied and exercised under his officers, to overturn the state for the purposes of that potentate,--in that case, the rioters might (if the witness was believed) be supposed only the troops, and persons more reputable the leaders and commanders, in such a rebellion. All cla.s.ses in the obnoxious description, who could not be suspected of the lower crime of riot, might be involved in the odium, in the suspicion, and sometimes in the punishment, of a higher and far more criminal species of offence.

These proceedings did not arise from any one of the Popery laws since repealed, but from this circ.u.mstance, that, when it answered the purposes of an election party or a malevolent person of influence to forge such plots, the people had no protection. The people of that description have no hold on the gentlemen who aspire to be popular representatives. The candidates neither love nor respect nor fear them, individually or collectively. I do not think this evil (an evil amongst a thousand others) at this day entirely over; for I conceive I have lately seen some indication of a disposition perfectly similar to the old one,--that is, a disposition to carry the imputation of crimes from persons to descriptions, and wholly to alter the character and quality of the offences themselves.

This universal exclusion seems to me a serious evil,--because many collateral oppressions, besides what I have just now stated, have arisen from it. In things of this nature it would not be either easy or proper to quote chapter and verse; but I have great reason to believe, particularly since the Octennial Act, that several have refused at all to let their lands to Roman Catholics, because it would so far disable them from promoting such interests in counties as they were inclined to favor. They who consider also the state of all sorts of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and particularly publicans in towns, must soon discern the disadvantages under which those labor who have no votes. It cannot be otherwise, whilst the spirit of elections and the tendencies of human nature continue as they are. If property be artificially separated from franchise, the franchise must in some way or other, and in some proportion, naturally attract property to it. Many are the collateral disadvantages, amongst a _privileged_ people, which must attend on those who have _no_ privileges.

Among the rich, each individual, with or without a franchise, is of importance; the poor and the middling are no otherwise so than as they obtain some collective capacity, and can be aggregated to some corps. If legal ways are not found, illegal will be resorted to; and seditious clubs and confederacies, such as no man living holds in greater horror than I do, will grow and flourish, in spite, I am afraid, of anything which can be done to prevent the evil. Lawful enjoyment is the surest method to prevent unlawful gratification. Where there is property, there will be less theft; where there is marriage, there will always be less fornication.

I have said enough of the question of state, _as it affects the people merely as such_. But it is complicated with a political question relative to religion, to which it is very necessary I should say something,--because the term _Protestant_, which you apply, is too general for the conclusions which one of your accurate understanding would wish to draw from it, and because a great deal of argument will depend on the use that is made of that term.

It is _not_ a fundamental part of the settlement at the Revolution that the state should be Protestant _without any qualification of the term_.

With a qualification it is unquestionably true; not in all its lat.i.tude.

With the qualification, it was true before the Revolution. Our predecessors in legislation were not so irrational (not to say impious) as to form an operose ecclesiastical establishment, and even to render the state itself in some degree subservient to it, when their religion (if such it might be called) was nothing but a mere _negation_ of some other,--without any positive idea, either of doctrine, discipline, worship, or morals, in the scheme which they professed themselves, and which they imposed upon others, even under penalties and incapacities.

No! No! This never could have been done, even by reasonable atheists.

They who think religion of no importance to the state have abandoned it to the conscience or caprice of the individual; they make no provision for it whatsoever, but leave every club to make, or not, a voluntary contribution towards its support, according to their fancies. This would be consistent. The other always appeared to me to be a monster of contradiction and absurdity. It was for that reason, that, some years ago, I strenuously opposed the clergy who pet.i.tioned, to the number of about three hundred, to be freed from the subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, without proposing to subst.i.tute any other in their place. There never has been a religion of the state (the few years of the Parliament only excepted) but that of _the Episcopal Church of England_: the Episcopal Church of England, before the Reformation, connected with the see of Rome; since then, disconnected, and protesting against some of her doctrines, and against the whole of her authority, as binding in our national church: nor did the fundamental laws of this kingdom (in Ireland it has been the same) ever know, at any period, any other church _as an object of establishment_,--or, in that light, any other Protestant religion. Nay, our Protestant _toleration_ itself, at the Revolution, and until within a few years, required a signature of thirty-six, and a part of the thirty-seventh, out of the Thirty-Nine Articles. So little idea had they at the Revolution of _establishing_ Protestantism indefinitely, that they did not indefinitely _tolerate_ it under that name. I do not mean to praise that strictness, where nothing more than merely religious toleration is concerned. Toleration, being a part of moral and political prudence, ought to be tender and large. A tolerant government ought not to be too scrupulous in its investigations, but may bear without blame, not only very ill-grounded doctrines, but even many things that are positively vices, where they are _adulta et praevalida_. The good of the commonwealth is the rule which rides over the rest; and to this every other must completely submit.

The Church of Scotland knows as little of Protestantism _undefined_ as the Church of England and Ireland do. She has by the articles of union secured to herself the perpetual establishment of _the Confession of Faith_, and the _Presbyterian_ Church government. In England, even during the troubled interregnum, it was not thought fit to establish a _negative_ religion; but the Parliament settled the _Presbyterian_ as the Church _discipline_, the _Directory_ as the rule of public _worship_, and the _Westminster Catechism_ as the inst.i.tute of _faith_.

This is to show that at no time was the Protestant religion, _undefined_, established here or anywhere else, as I believe. I am sure, that, when the three religions were established in Germany, they were expressly characterized and declared to be the _Evangelic_, the _Reformed_, and the _Catholic_; each of which has its confession of faith and its settled discipline: so that you always may know the best and the worst of them, to enable you to make the most of what is good, and to correct or to qualify or to guard against whatever may seem evil or dangerous.

As to the coronation oath, to which you allude, as opposite to admitting a Roman Catholic to the use of any franchise whatsoever, I cannot think that the king would be perjured, if he gave his a.s.sent to any regulation which Parliament might think fit to make with regard to that affair. The king is bound by law, as clearly specified in several acts of Parliament, to be in communion with the Church of England. It is a part of the tenure by which he holds his crown; and though no provision was made till the Revolution, which could be called positive and valid in law, to ascertain this great principle, I have always considered it as in fact fundamental, that the king of England should be of the Christian religion, according to the national legal church for the time being. I conceive it was so before the Reformation. Since the Reformation it became doubly necessary; because the king is the head of that church, in some sort an ecclesiastical person,--and it would be incongruous and absurd to have the head of the Church of one faith, and the members of another. The king may _inherit_ the crown as a _Protestant_; but he cannot _hold it_, according to law, without being a Protestant _of the Church of England_.

Before we take it for granted that the king is bound by his coronation oath not to admit any of his Catholic subjects to the rights and liberties which ought to belong to them as Englishmen, (not as religionists,) or to settle the conditions or proportions of such admission by an act of Parliament, I wish you to place before your eyes that oath itself, as it is settled in the act of William and Mary.

"Will you to the utmost of your power maintain 1 2 3 the laws of G.o.d, the true profession of the Gospel, 4 and the Protestant Reformed Religion _established by_ 5 _law_? And will you preserve unto the _bishops_ and clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to _their_ charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them, or any of them?--All this I promise to do."

Here are the coronation engagements of the king. In them I do not find one word to preclude his Majesty from consenting to any arrangement which Parliament may make with regard to the civil privileges of any part of his subjects.

It may not be amiss, on account of the light which it will throw on this discussion, to look a little more narrowly into the matter of that oath,--in order to discover how far it has. .h.i.therto operated, or how far in future it ought to operate, as a bar to any proceedings of the crown and Parliament in favor of those against whom it may be supposed that the king has engaged to support the Protestant Church of England in the two kingdoms in which it is established by law. First, the king swears he will maintain to the utmost of his power "the laws of G.o.d." I suppose it means the natural moral laws.--Secondly, he swears to maintain "the true profession of the Gospel." By which I suppose is understood _affirmatively_ the Christian religion.--Thirdly, that he will maintain "the Protestant reformed religion." This leaves me no power of supposition or conjecture; for that Protestant reformed religion is defined and described by the subsequent words, "established by law"; and in this instance, to define it beyond all possibility of doubt, he swears to maintain the "bishops and clergy, and the churches committed to their charge," in their rights present and future.

The oath as effectually prevents the king from doing anything to the prejudice of the Church, in favor of sectaries, Jews, Mahometans, or plain avowed infidels, as if he should do the same thing in favor of the Catholics. You will see that it is the same Protestant Church, so described, that the king is to maintain and communicate with, according to the Act of Settlement of the 12th and 13th of William the Third. The act of the 5th of Anne, made in prospect of the Union, is ent.i.tled, "An act for securing the Church of England as by law established." It meant to guard the Church implicitly against any other mode of Protestant religion which might creep in by means of the Union. It proves beyond all doubt, that the legislature did not mean to guard the Church on one part only, and to leave it defenceless and exposed upon every other.

This church, in that act, is declared to be "fundamental and essential"

forever, in the Const.i.tution of the United Kingdom, so far as England is concerned; and I suppose, as the law stands, even since the independence, it is so in Ireland.

All this shows that the religion which the king is bound to maintain has a positive part in it, as well as a negative,--and that the positive part of it (in which we are in perfect agreement with the Catholics and with the Church of Scotland) is infinitely the most valuable and essential. Such an agreement we had with Protestant Dissenters in England, of those descriptions who came under the Toleration Act of King William and Queen Mary: an act coeval with the Revolution; and which ought, on the principles of the gentlemen who oppose the relief to the Catholics, to have been held sacred and unalterable. Whether we agree with the present Protestant Dissenters in the points at the Revolution held essential and fundamental among Christians, or in any other fundamental, at present it is impossible for us to know: because, at their own very earnest desire, we have repealed the Toleration Act of William and Mary, and discharged them from the signature required by that act; and because, for the far greater part, they publicly declare against all manner of confessions of faith, even the _Consensus_.

For reasons forcible enough at all times, but at this time particularly forcible with me, I dwell a little the longer upon this matter, and take the more pains, to put us both in mind that it was not settled at the Revolution that the state should be Protestant, in the lat.i.tude of the term, but in a defined and limited sense only, and that in that sense only the king is sworn to maintain it. To suppose that the king has sworn with his utmost power to maintain what it is wholly out of his power to discover, or which, if he could discover, he might discover to consist of things directly contradictory to each other, some of them perhaps impious, blasphemous, and seditious upon principle, would be not only a gross, but a most mischievous absurdity. If mere dissent from the Church of Rome be a merit, he that dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious. In many points we hold strongly with that church. He that dissents throughout with that church will dissent with the Church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves: a whimsical species of merit for any set of men to establish. We quarrel to extremity with those who we know agree with us in many things; but we are to be so malicious even in the principle of our friendships, that we are to cherish in our bosom those who accord with us in nothing, because, whilst they despise ourselves, they abhor, even more than we do, those with whom we have some disagreement. A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion. Whether a person's having no Christian religion be a t.i.tle to favor, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians, who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some errors and some superfluities, is rather more than any man, who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I believe, choose to affirm. The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may by degrees encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in matters of doctrine, and, in the end, of practice too. If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and persecuting atheism which is the disgrace and calamity of our time, and which we see to be as capable of subverting a government as any mode can be of misguided zeal for better things.

Now let us fairly see what course has been taken relative to those against whom, in part at least, the king has sworn to maintain a church, _positive in its doctrine and its discipline_. The first thing done, even when the oath was fresh in the mouth of the sovereigns, was to give a toleration to Protestant Dissenters _whose doctrines they ascertained_. As to the mere civil privileges which the Dissenters held as subjects before the Revolution, these were not touched at all. The laws have fully permitted, in a qualification for all offices, to such Dissenters, _an occasional conformity_: a thing I believe singular, where tests are admitted. The act, called the Test Act, itself, is, with regard to them, grown to be hardly anything more than a dead letter.

Whenever the Dissenters cease by their conduct to give any alarm to the government, in Church and State, I think it very probable that even this matter, rather disgustful than inconvenient to them, may be removed, or at least so modified as to distinguish the qualification to those offices which really _guide the state_ from those which are _merely instrumental_, or that some other and better tests may be put in their place.

So far as to England. In Ireland you have outran us. Without waiting for an English example, you have totally, and without any modification whatsoever, repealed the test as to Protestant Dissenters. Not having the repealing act by me, I ought not to say positively that there is no exception in it; but if it be what I suppose it is, you know very well that a Jew in religion, or a Mahometan, or even _a public, declared atheist_ and blasphemer, is perfectly qualified to be Lord-Lieutenant, a lord-justice, or even keeper of the king's conscience, and by virtue of his office (if with you it be as it is with us) administrator to a great part of the ecclesiastical patronage of the crown.

Now let us deal a little fairly. We must admit that Protestant Dissent was one of the quarters from which danger was apprehended at the Revolution, and against which a part of the coronation oath was peculiarly directed. By this unqualified repeal you certainly did not mean to deny that it was the duty of the crown to preserve the Church against Protestant Dissenters; or taking this to be the true sense of the two Revolution acts of King William, and of the previous and subsequent Union acts of Queen Anne, you did not declare by this most unqualified repeal, by which you broke down all the barriers, not invented, indeed, but carefully preserved, at the Revolution,--you did not then and by that proceeding declare that you had advised the king to perjury towards G.o.d and perfidy towards the Church. No! far, very far from it! You never would have done it, if you did not think it could be done with perfect repose to the royal conscience, and perfect safety to the national established religion. You did this upon a full consideration of the circ.u.mstances of your country. Now, if circ.u.mstances required it, why should it be contrary to the king's oath, his Parliament judging on those circ.u.mstances, to restore to his Catholic people, in such measure and with such modifications as the public wisdom shall think proper to add, _some part_ in these franchises which they formerly had held without any limitation at all, and which, upon no sort of urgent reason at the time, they were deprived of? If such means can with any probability be shown, from circ.u.mstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular Const.i.tution than to weaken it, surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions, continued from generation to generation. They are perfectly consistent with the other parts of the coronation oath, in which the king swears to maintain "the laws of G.o.d and the true profession of the Gospel, and to govern the people according to the statutes in Parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the realm." In consenting to such a statute, the crown would act at least as agreeable to the laws of G.o.d, and to the true profession of the Gospel, and to the laws and customs of the kingdom, as George the First did, when he pa.s.sed the statute which took from the body of the people everything which to that hour, and even after the monstrous acts of the 2nd and 8th of Anne, (the objects of our common hatred,) they still enjoyed inviolate.

It is hard to distinguish with the last degree of accuracy what laws are fundamental, and what not. However, there is a distinction between them, authorized by the writers on jurisprudence, and recognized in some of our statutes. I admit the acts of King William and Queen Anne to be fundamental, but they are not the only fundamental laws. The law called _Magna Charta_, by which it is provided that "no man shall be disseised of his liberties and free customs but by the judgment of his peers or the laws of the land," (meaning clearly, for some proved crime tried and adjudged,) I take to be _a fundamental law._ Now, although this Magna Charta, or some of the statutes establishing it, provide that that law shall be perpetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority of statutes made in defiance of Magna Charta and all its principles. This, however, I will say,--that it is a very venerable law, made by very wise and learned men, and that the legislature, in their attempt to perpetuate it, even against the authority of future Parliaments, have shown their judgment that it is _fundamental_, on the same grounds and in the same manner that the act of the fifth of Anne has considered and declared the establishment of the Church of England to be fundamental. Magna Charta, which secured these franchises to the subjects, regarded the rights of freeholders in counties to be as much a fundamental part of the Const.i.tution as the establishment of the Church of England was thought either at that time, or in the act of King William, or in the act of Queen Anne.

The churchmen who led in that transaction certainly took care of the material interest of which they were the natural guardians. It is the first article of Magna Charta, "that the Church of England shall be free," &c, &c. But at that period, churchmen and barons and knights took care of the franchises and free customs of the people, too. Those franchises are part of the Const.i.tution itself, and inseparable from it.

It would be a very strange thing, if there should not only exist anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but that the fundamental parts of the Const.i.tution should be perpetually and irreconcilably at variance with each other. I cannot persuade myself that the lovers of our church are not as able to find effectual ways of reconciling its safety with the franchises of the people as the ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot conceive how anything worse can be said of the Protestant religion of the Church of England than this,--that, wherever it is judged proper to give it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to deprive the body of the people, if they adhere to their old opinions, of "their liberties and of all their free customs," and to reduce them to a state of _civil_ servitude.

There is no man on earth, I believe, more willing than I am to lay it down as a fundamental of the Const.i.tution, that the Church of England should be united and even identified with it; but, allowing this, I cannot allow that all _laws of regulation_, made from time to time, in support of that fundamental law, are of course equally fundamental and equally unchangeable. This would be to confound all the branches of legislation and of jurisprudence. The _crown_ and the personal safety of the monarch are _fundamentals_ in our Const.i.tution: yet I hope that no man regrets that the rabble of statutes got together during the reign of Henry the Eighth, by which treasons are multiplied with so prolific an energy, have been all repealed in a body; although they were all, or most of them, made in support of things truly fundamental in our Const.i.tution. So were several of the acts by which the crown exercised its supremacy: such as the act of Elizabeth for making the _high commission courts_, and the like; as well as things made treason in the time of Charles the Second. None of this species of _secondary and subsidiary laws_ have been held fundamental. They have yielded to circ.u.mstances; particularly where they were thought, even in their consequences, or obliquely, to affect other fundamentals. How much more, certainly, ought they to give way, when, as in our case, they affect, not here and there, in some particular point, or in their consequence, but universally, collectively, and directly, the fundamental franchises of a people equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable kingdoms and states: equal to the subjects of the kings of Sardinia or of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands; and more than are to be found in all the states of Switzerland. This way of proscribing men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the Const.i.tution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in the world. Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late and reluctantly, that the safety of the Church is utterly inconsistent with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely sorry for it; because I shall think the Church to be truly in danger. It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in G.o.d they never will be put.

I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics you touch upon, relative to the religion of the king, and his coronation oath. I shall conclude the observations which I wished to submit to you on this point by a.s.suring you that I think you the most remote that can be conceived from the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between more and less,--and who of course would think that the reason of the law which obliged the king to be a communicant of the Church of England would be as valid to exclude a Catholic from being an exciseman, or to deprive a man who has five hundred a year, under that description, from voting on a par with a fact.i.tious Protestant Dissenting freeholder of forty shillings.

Recollect, my dear friend, that it was a fundamental principle in the French monarchy, whilst it stood, that the state should be Catholic; yet the Edict of Nantes gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a complete civil _establishment_, with places of which only they were capable, to the Calvinists of France,--and there were very few employments, indeed, of which they were not capable. The world praised the Cardinal de Richelieu, who took the first opportunity to strip them of their fortified places and cautionary towns. The same world held and does hold in execration (so far as that business is concerned) the memory of Louis the Fourteenth, for the total repeal of that favorable edict; though the talk of "fundamental laws, established religion, religion of the prince, safety to the state," &c., &c., was then as largely held, and with as bitter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.

Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reason does not hold, when the religious relation of the sovereign and subject is changed; but they who have their shop full of false weights and measures, and who imagine that the adding or taking away the name of Protestant or Papist, Guelph or Ghibelline, alters all the principles of equity, policy, and prudence, leave us no common data upon which we can reason.

I therefore pa.s.s by all this, which on you will make no impression, to come to what seems to be a serious consideration in your mind: I mean the dread you express of "reviewing, for the purpose of altering, the _principles of the Revolution_." This is an interesting topic, on which I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the ideas I have formed.