ty and Religion; the former everywhere is gathering
strength, and wherever it breaks loose the foundations of human society
will be shaken. Do not suppose that you are safe from this danger
because you are blest with a pure creed, a reformed ritual, and a
tolerant Church! Even here the standard of impiety has been set up; and
the drummers who beat the march of intellect through your streets, lanes,
and market-places, are enlisted under it.

The struggle between Popery and Protestanism is renewed. And let no man
deceive himself by a vain reliance upon the increased knowledge, or
improved humanity of the times! Wickedness is ever the same; and you
never were in so much danger from moral weakness.

Co-existent with these struggles is that between the feudal system of
society as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levelling
principle of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably at
work in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Popery
or with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or with
hypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, but
all acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to be
trying that experiment with the British Constitution which Mithridates is
said to have tried upon his own; they suffer poison to be administered in
daily doses, as if they expected that by such a course the public mind
would at length be rendered poison-proof!

The first of these struggles will affect all Christendom; the third may
once again shake the monarchies of Europe. The second will be felt
widely; but nowhere with more violence than in Ireland, that unhappy
country, wherein your government, after the most impolitic measures into
which weakness was ever deluded, or pusillanimity intimidated, seems to
have abdicated its functions, contenting itself with the semblance of an
authority which it has wanted either wisdom or courage to exert.

There is a fourth danger, the growth of your manufacturing system; and
this is peculiarly your own. You have a great and increasing population,
exposed at all times by the fluctuations of trade to suffer the severest
privations in the midst of a rich and luxurious society, under little or
no restraint from religious principle, and if not absolutely disaffected
to the institutions of the country, certainly not attached to them: a
class of men aware of their numbers and of their strength; expe