ich preserved its fidelity, the only
place in which France got no footing, the only peopled colony which now
remains to Great Britain. Vain are all the prognostics taken from ideas
and passions, which survive the state of things which gave rise to them.
When last year we gave a popular representation to the same Canada by
the choice of the landholders, and an aristocratic representation at the
choice of the crown, neither was the choice of the crown nor the
election of the landholders limited by a consideration of religion. We
had no dread for the Protestant Church which we settled there, because
we permitted the French Catholics, in the utmost latitude of the
description, to be free subjects. They are good subjects, I have no
doubt; but I will not allow that any French Canadian Catholics are
better men or better citizens than the Irish of the same communion.
Passing from the extremity of the West to the extremity almost of the
East, I have been many years (now entering into the twelfth) employed in
supporting the rights, privileges, laws, and immunities of a very remote
people. I have not as yet been able to finish my task. I have struggled
through much discouragement and much opposition, much obloquy, much
calumny, for a people with whom I have no tie but the common bond of
mankind. In this I have not been left alone. We did not fly from our
undertaking because the people are Mahometans or Pagans, and that a
great majority of the Christians amongst them are Papists. Some
gentlemen in Ireland, I dare say, have good reasons for what they may
do, which do not occur to me. I do not presume to condemn them; but,
thinking and acting as I have done towards those remote nations, I
should not know how to show my face, here or in Ireland, if I should say
that all the Pagans, all the Mussulmen, and even all the Papists, (since
they must form the highest stage in the climax of evil,) are worthy of a
liberal and honorable condition, except those of one of the
descriptions, which forms the majority of the inhabitants of the
country in which you and I were born. If such are the Catholics of
Ireland, ill-natured and unjust people, from our own data, may be
inclined not to think better of the Protestants of a soil which is
supposed to infuse into its sects a kind of venom unknown in other
places.

You hated the old system as early as I did. Your first juvenile lance
was broken against that giant. I think you were even the first who
a