Catholics
to unite with the Dissenters. Such it is, though it were clothed in
never such bland and civil forms, and wrapped up, as a poet says, in a
thousand "artful folds of sacred lawn." For my own part, I do not know
in what manner to shape such arguments, so as to obtain admission for
them into a rational understanding. Everything of this kind is to be
reduced at last to threats of power. I cannot say, _Vae victis_! and then
throw the sword into the scale. I have no sword; and if I had, in this
case, most certainly, I would not use it as a makeweight in political
reasoning.

Observe, on these principles, the difference between the procedure of
the Parliament and the Dissenters towards the people in question. One
employs courtship, the other force. The Dissenters offer bribes, the
Parliament nothing but the _front negatif_ of a stern and forbidding
authority. A man may be very wrong in his ideas of what is good for
him. But no man affronts me, nor can therefore justify my affronting
him, by offering to make me as happy as himself, according to his own
ideas of happiness. This the Dissenters do to the Catholics. You are on
the different extremes. The Dissenters offer, with regard to
constitutional rights and civil advantages of all sorts, _everything_;
you refuse _everything_. With them, there is boundless, though not very
assured hope; with you, a very sure and very unqualified despair. The
terms of alliance from the Dissenters offer a representation of the
commons, chosen out of the people by the head. This is absurdly and
dangerously large, in my opinion; and that scheme of election is known
to have been at all times perfectly odious to me. But I cannot think it
right of course to punish the Irish Roman Catholics by an universal
exclusion, because others, whom you would not punish at all, propose an
universal admission. I cannot dissemble to myself, that, in this very
kingdom, many persons who are not in the situation of the Irish
Catholics, but who, on the contrary, enjoy the full benefit of the
Constitution as it stands, and some of whom, from the effect of their
fortunes, enjoy it in a large measure, had some years ago associated to
procure great and undefined changes (they considered them as reforms) in
the popular part of the Constitution. Our friend, the late Mr. Flood,
(no slight man,) proposed in his place, and in my hearing, a
representation not much less extensive than this, for England,--in which
every