ted and discoloured by a mist sprung from our own
theories and our own passions. Some friends of religious liberty, not
content with the advantage which they possessed in the fair conflict
of reason with reason, weakened their case by maintaining that the law
which excluded Irish Roman Catholics from Parliament was inconsistent
with the civil Treaty of Limerick. The First article of that Treaty, it
was said, guaranteed to the Irish Roman Catholic such privileges in the
exercise of his religion as he had enjoyed in the time of Charles
the Second. In the time of Charles the Second no test excluded Roman
Catholics from the Irish Parliament. Such a test could not therefore,
it was argued, be imposed without a breach of public faith. In the year
1828, especially, this argument was put forward in the House of Commons
as if it had been the main strength of a cause which stood in need of no
such support. The champions of Protestant ascendency were well pleased
to see the debate diverted from a political question about which they
were in the wrong, to a historical question about which they were in
the right. They had no difficulty in proving that the first article,
as understood by all the contracting parties, meant only that the Roman
Catholic worship should be tolerated as in time past. That article was
drawn up by Ginkell; and, just before he drew it up, he had declared
that he would rather try the chance of arms than consent that Irish
Papists should be capable of holding civil and military offices, of
exercising liberal professions, and of becoming members of municipal
corporations. How is it possible to believe that he would, of his own
accord, have promised that the House of Lords and the House of Commons
should be open to men to whom he would not open a guild of skinners or
a guild of cordwainers? How, again, is it possible to believe that the
English Peers would, while professing the most punctilious respect
for public faith, while lecturing the Commons on the duty of observing
public faith, while taking counsel with the most learned and upright
jurist of the age as to the best mode of maintaining public faith, have
committed a flagrant violation of public faith and that not a single
lord should have been so honest or so factious as to protest against
an act of monstrous perfidy aggravated by hypocrisy? Or, if we could
believe this, how can we believe that no voice would have been raised in
any part of the world against s