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