would still be a religion not to be trusted, and if this measure be carried, I have no doubt, but that three years hence, we shall have the same associations; perhaps not the same orators, a Lawless instead of an O'Connell, at the head of the Irish Roman Catholics, and the same tales of grievances about Catholic millions being still excluded from being lord chancellor, and still being compelled to pay tithe to Protestant rectors, and rent to Protestant landlords. The truth is, that the whole of our constitution, as my honourable friend the member for Corfe Castle stated, is a system of securities and exclusions. In every instance in which we give power, we regulate it by age, by sex, by property; and I am yet to learn, why, in a question of the probabilities of human conduct, I ought not to have regard to the opinion also of the party to whom I am to give power; particularly when he tells me, that he will not regard my king in the light in which the constitution has placed him, viz. "as over all persons ecclesiastical as well as civil, in these his realms, supreme," but that he will regard another person, and him a foreign prince, as in these realms, and over one-half of human affairs supreme. the object was, to give toleration, not power-" The Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, &c." -; but I have trespassed so long upon the indulgence of the House, that I am unwilling to enter at any length upon this branch of the subject. My right hon. friend, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and others, have indeed discussed it fully and conclusively. I therefore will no longer intrude on the attention of the House. I admit with the hon. member for Armagh in his eloquent and influential speech on a former occasion, that we have only a choice of difficulties; every path is beset with dangers; but I think that it is the part of wisdom to keep, in such circumstances, to the path along which we have hitherto travelled, leading, as it has led us, to the greatest public freedom, and the greatest private happiness which have ever been combined, rather than to deviate into any other path, which, even on the admission of the guides, who pretend to know it best, may lead us further, and in very different direction, from that in which we desire to go. For these reasons, Sir, and having heard nothing which has induced me to change the opinions which for many years I have held in private life on this question, I shall vote against the third reading of this b a If I could consider these claims of the Roman Catholics, as claims of justice, founded either in abstract natural right, or in specific convention, whether treaty of Limerick, or articles of Union, I should be ashamed to resist a claim of right on any pretence of expediency. I feel it painful on many grounds to resist these demands. I feel this to be painful, but I hope that I should feel it to be intolerable, if I believed that their claims, so long urged, were founded in justice, and in abstract right; but, Sir, protection is the right of every member in civil society; power is the right of no man. No man has an abstract right to possess pow-swered before, and had confined them er in any community; it is the free gift of each community to each person, to each class; and on the principle on which the constitution of England, consisting indivisibly of Church and State, has refused to give power, except to those who support it so undivided, I entirely concur. That under the treaty of Limerick, or under the articles of Union, the Roman Catholics of Ireland have any claim whatever to the measure which they now demand, I am deliberately prepared to deny : the first article of the treaty shows that 1. Mr. Horace Twiss said, that although the opposition to this bill had been rested mainly on the ancient grounds, that the proposed alteration would be repugnant to the constitution, and upon that remarkable theory of the honourable member for Corfe Castle, that this constitution is in its genius exclusive, yet the friends of the bill had hitherto taken little notice of this line of argument; perhaps, because it had, in various ways, been often an selves almost wholly to topics of temporary interest and urgency. But, it would be to be regretted, if the country should thence infer that the advocates of concession had given way upon the main constitutional ground; and he would therefore solicit the observation of the House to one general constitutional view of the question, which he believed had not before been presented, at least, not connectedly, or in its clearest light. Now, persuaded as he was, that the many humane and candid individuals who voted against this bill on the second read- | was naturally thought requisite that a ing, would not thus have impeded a measure, of which no man denies the vast importance to the whole Irish people, had it not been for a sincere belief, that great as are the present evils of Ireland, there would be a greater evil still in any breach of the constitution, he thought that the desideratum on the part of the Catholic population of Ireland, was no longer to make out a case of strong appeal to the feelings of the House, for as far as feelings were concerned, there had been enough to make the House unanimous in their favour; but the task required now, was, to satisfy the reason of the House, that in truth the opinion is absolutely a mistaken one, which assumes the exclusion of that body to be a principle of the British constitution. Now, in dealing with this, which was, therefore, the material question remaining on the bill, he would narrow the issue to one single point of the exclusive law; and that issue could not well be taken upon a point more convenient than the exclusion from parliament; because, that is the particular exclusion which the opposing party regard as the strongest in principle for their arguiment; and this should be practicable to make out the proposition, that even this exclusion from parliament was not of the essence of the constitution, it would hardly be pretended, that there was any thing essential in the exclusion from any of the minor franchises. It was, probably, a fact familiar to most of those whom he now addressed, that though several en actments existed for a century before the Revolution, imposing severe penalties upon popish recusants under certain circumstances, yet the only principle, regarding franchise or eligibility, that was known to the constitution down to the close of Charles the second's reign-a principle unqualified by any condition but the single one of acknowledging the political supremacy of our own sovereign, to which the Catholics, for the most part, have never been averse, was the commonlaw principle, as declared by lord Bacon, that "the subject that is natural born hath a competency or ability to all benefits whatsoever." When the parliament, therefore, in Charles the second's reign, enacted the tests which this bill proposed to repeal, and which tests, with some little modification of the oath under William and Mary, are at this day the bars to the entrance of Catholics into parliament, it deviation so striking from the commonlaw principle of general eligibility, should be justified or at least explained, to the people of whom it disfranchised some hundreds of thousands, by setting forth, on the face of this statute of Car. 2nd, some statement of the then subsisting reasons for the exclusion. Now, if those original reasons, which may have been thoroughly valid and constitutional at the first, continued valid and constitutional still, then it might be true, that exclusion is a principle of the constitution, and ought not to be superseded by such a bill as the present. But, if those original reasons were spent and gone-if all their spirit has evaporated with time-then either it must be shown that other constitutional reasons have arisen since, which now supply their place; or it must be allowed that, with the extinction of the constitutional reasons for exclusion, the exclusion itself had lost its constitutional character, and merited support no longer [hear, hear!]. The makers of this statute of Car. 2nd, set forth in its preamble, that the divers good laws then in being against popery, had failed of their desired effects, by reason that popish recusants had access to court, and liberty to sit and vote in parliament. For the sake, therefore, of ensuring "the desired effects," by the removal of those two obstructions to the good laws against popery, as also for safety against the danger with which the popish plot was then supposed to be threatening king Charles and his government-for these two reasons (and these are all that the statute even alleged) the legislature proceeded, among other enactments, to provide for the exclusion of Catholics from the parliament as well as from the court. Now, upon this, the first thing which struck one's observation was, that this exclusion from parliament, instead of having been what very many suppose it, a regulation of a substantive character, intended to form a new era and a permanent principle in our constitution, was in truth enacted in the humble, secondary character of a help to the desired effect to the divers good laws then preexisting against popery. Now, what did gentlemen suppose those divers good laws against popery are, which this especial help was thus introduced to invigorate? Something which we fondly cling towhich we religiously and affectionately more nor less than the body of repealed pains and penalties [hear, hear!]-that body, which, after it had survived all the circumstances that perhaps in the 16th and 17th centuries may have justified its original creation, was decayed by time into disuse and very disgust, and lay for years a lifeless lump in our legislation; when parliament passed the act of 1791, the celebrated 31st of George the third, which buried the last remains of the nuisance, and removed it for ever from the nostrils of the people. That was the collection of divers good laws against popery, which, this preamble said, would fail of their desired effect, if papists were not forbidden to sit and vote in parliament! To preserve at this day, when parliament had swept away the code itself, a harsh restriction, which, by its own original preamble, affected no higher character than to have been subservient to that code, would, at best, be an absurdity-even if it did not involve a wrong. But it is a wrong, and in nothing more notoriously than in this-that, while the original preamble to the restriction keeps its prominent place upon the Statute book, setting forth, as its reason, a code of laws, now long since repealed and annulled, the restriction not merely keeps the birthright of our fellow subjects from them, but keeps it from them now upon a false pretence [hear!].. act upon and revere? They are neither | formidable plot against the government five disfranchised millions then come by their very numbers to be the rule, and the one single million which has the franchise to be the exception? And, if that was the real result of the theory, if the doctrine established that disqualification was the common and general rule, and eligibility only the privileged and rare exception; if the argument thus construed the constitution to be the inherit ance of only one man in every half-dozen, he ventured unequivocally to retort upon that doctrine the charge of unconstitutional tendency, and to affirm that the breach of allegiance to the constitution was not with those who would communicate it, and promote its growth, but with those who would cramp and curtail it. one It was true, that the promotion of the divers good laws against popery, was only of the two motives alleged in this preamble; for it adverted to another, and at that time a much more really influential cause, the danger, or rather the terror, of the Popish plot. Now, on this he would not say one single word, because, without meaning any disrespect to a certain wellknown protest against the reversal of lord Stafford's attainder, he thought that danger so obsolete, that any man who should attempt now to revive an alarm about Catholic conspirators and popish lords, would enter upon his task at the risk not merely of refutation, but of ridicule. If Titus Oates himself were alive again, such a scheme would be a despair, even to his matchless and mendacious impudence. Aye, but it had been repeatedly said, and the argument had derived a value from its adoption by his right hon. friend, the Secretary of State for the Home Department; though Oates's history were a false hood, yet there was another real and and religion of the country, detected from Coleman's Letters, and from Charles's secret treaties with Louis--a plot which justified, at least, though it may not have specifically induced, the strong measure of excluding papists from parliament. Let it be so: grant that this real plot did justify exclusion: grant even that both the plots were real: what mattered all these things to the present generation, who live in times so distant, that not only are all the conspirators with their conspiracies crumbled into dust, but the government itself, for whose safety against them this statute professed to provide, had been remodelled on a larger and a surer foundation; and the only surviving memorial, that such a danger was ever apprehended, was this irritating though futile remnant of restriction! The reasons assigned in the statute of Charles 2nd having both thus entirely ceased, the vindicator of the tests was driven to seek their constitutional title in such other reasons as might have arisen since. The principal of these ex-post facto reasons was, that the exclusion had been settled at the time of the Revolution. It was an article, the solicitor-general had said, in the compact of king William with the English leaders, in order to confirm the Protestant constitution of these realms. No: but in order to another object, doubtless very important while it lasted, but an object in its nature not quite so lasting-in order to confirm the new and not yet secure title of the prince and princess of Orange [hear, hear!]; in order to provide, at a juncture when almost every Catholic was a partisan of James, a test which, in the Papist, should detect the Jacobite [hear, hear!). For this, the real object, there was no need that these invidious disqualifications should be prolonged beyond the secure completion of the royal settlement; and whenever the country should become secure, so also would become the constitution which had been planted in its soil. But, the moment any one approached this part of the case, he was straightway warned off, as a sort of trespasser upon the constitution of 1688. Now, he would by no means speak loosely or lightly of any thing so enacted or sanctioned: all was done, he believed, for the very best at that time; but the modern mistake about the constitution, as then arranged, consisted in not distinguishing between [510 its permanent principles and its temporary | talk of the five millions of disfranchised expedients. The permanent principle subjects as the exceptions? Did not the of the constitution was not that which had been stated by his hon. friend who had spoken last, but that which all our arrangements, both in and since the reign of king William, had concurred with a uniform tendency to establish, the principle, namely, that every individual subject, whatever his station, shall not only possess a perfect security for his person and property, but shall likewise hold the greatest proportion of public liberties and rights, which it can consist with the general welfare, that he be permitted to enjoy or to exercise [much cheering!]; and every measure seemed to him to be consistent or inconsistent with the constitution, not as it tallied with any written rule, whether laid down under the particular circumstances of 1825, or under the particular circumstances of 1688; but as it promoted or as it impeded that great general principle [hear, hear!]. Let those, then, who professed to be apprehensive for the constitution, first make sure that they understand it in its true sense; and then let them consider frankly, not whether the restriction to be repealed may once have been necessary to the constitution, because that he need not refuse to admit; but whether such a restriction was necessary now [hear, hear!]. Let them remember, that though actual equality of political privileges was an arrangement as impracticable as actual equality of private possessions, yet that constitution, after all, was the best and the safest, aye, for the higher classes as well as for the lower, which comes the nearest to that equalising principlewhich allows, not indeed an equal possession of franchise, but an equal eligibility to possess it: and that it is precisely this near approach to that principle in our own constitution, which has given it its superiority over all others which the world has ever seen [hear, hear!]. There may be exceptions, no doubt, and properly, to almost any general political rule -exceptions of troubled periods, and exceptions as to dangerous individuals; but might it properly be, as in Ireland, that one million of the people should for ever be the rule, and five millions of the people for ever the exception? that the exception should permanently comprise five times as many cases as the rule? At this rate, had there not been some strange confusion of language? Was it sense to It was time, then, for the House to disencumber itself of the obstinate error, that the men to whom we owed our constitution, while they left open the door to the Presbyterian, the hereditary opponent of monarchy, and to the sceptic, jealous of all religion, intended nevertheless that the exclusion of the sincerest and most loyal subject who might happen to be a Catholic, should outlast all the dangers and all the reasons by which at first, perhaps, that exclusion was justified. A private, but authentic narrative, related, that when the duke of (Orleans, some time Regent of France, was about to engage in his service a gentleman whose mother was of the uncourtly religion of the Jansenists, the faction opposed to Jansenism, the Jesuits about Louis the fourteenth, remonstrated with the king upon the abomination that would ensue, if the duke should take a Jansenist into his retinue. The king took the alarm. "Why, nephew," said he, "what can you be thinking of, to take a Jansenist into your household ?" " Sir," said the duke, with all appropriate humility, "I assure your majesty, the gentleman you suspect is no Jansenist; on the contrary, I have every reason to suspect that he is an utter disbeliever in all all religion whatever." "Oh!" said the king, "that alters the case if you assure me that he is no Jansenist, and that the only thing to be said against his principles is, that he has no religion at all, I beg I may not be understood to have the smallest objection to your employing him" [much laughter]. It was likely enough that Louis so reasoned, and so expressed himself; but he protested against putting the sentiments | of Louis the fourteenth into the mouth of William the third. He would shew that king William's principles were not chargeable with the inconsistencies imputed to them. It appeared, from the returns to parliament, in 1731, that in the earlier half of the last century, the whole Catholic population of Ireland was less than one million and one-third, and the number of Protestants between 7 and 800,000; and at the time of the Revolution, which was upwards of forty years before, the numbers were probably yet fewer. On a numeration so small, our ancestors might not unreasonably have considered that political dangers might justify the relative depression even of the majority of the whole people, when that majority exceeded the minority by only three or four hundred thousand persons, But, if those founders of our constitution were alive at this day, to see the Catholics, with other Dissenters, exceeding the Protestants of the Established Church by nearly five millions of souls, could it be thought, that in a state of facts so different, the law they would recommend would be the same? No: they would tell their country, according to the tenor of the principles, upon which their great names are founded, that to a surface so extensive a narrow rule must be inapplicable: that political inequalities, however occasionally justifiable upon a small scale, become intolerable and impossible upon a large one: and that the mere physical operation of things, the mere swelling of the stream of population, must hurry, of itself, irresistibly forward, to burst all those weak embankments, and lay waste the land which it should be forbidden to enrich. I listen to you, therefore, gladly, said the hon. gentleman, when you refer me to your ancestors; I allow and I admire the model; all I ask is, that we may avoid servility in studying it, that we may construe their code, not with a literal minuteness, but as its great authors would have written it had they been writing now; that we may no longer pore blindly upon the letter of their laws, but rise to the spirit of their legislation. Why, then, what became of the feeble assertion, that the founders of the constitution of 1688, having recognized and reenacted the exclusive tests, should be therefore understood as having intended to bequeath exclusion as a lasting component of their system? Was it meant that every statute against popery which was made before the Revolution, and which the parliament of king William did not repeal, or only altered a little, which was the most that could be said of this statute of Charles the second was it meant even that every statute against popery which king William and his parliament themselves originated, had thereby become, ipso facto, a fundamental law, for ever exempt from abrogation or change? That seemed too large an assumption for the loosest understanding to admit; especially after the unceremonious way in which not only the older enactments, the divers good law laws against against popery, but even their offspring, the laws of king William's own reign, were dealt with by the tolerating act of his late majesty, among whose very few human failings, a coldness toward the Protestant religion was certainly never even imputed. Gentlemen who relied on the inviolability of all the anti-catholic provisions that were arranged or acquiesced in at the time of the Revolution, might find themselves ensnared into difficulties which a mischief-loving papist would not take a little diversion to behold them struggling withal. The very first parliament under king William most seriously enactedludicrous as such a provision might now appear-that two justices of peace, from time to time, might search a recusant Catholic's house and premises to see if he possessed-what will it be supposed ? Arms? No. Treasonable papers? No. Treatises of dangerous divinity? Nobut to see if he possessed any horse of more than 5l. value; and, moreover, that any friend of that Catholic, assisting in the concealment of such unconstitutional popish nag, should be liable, not only to pecuniary penalties, but likewise to three months' imprisonment. Now, on the principles of some gentlemen, this law, for the exclusion of papists from the Turf, was just as rightfully an unalterable feature of the constitution, though a feature not quite so prominent, as the law for the exclusion of papists from parliament: nay, if there were any difference in point of authority between the two, the horse law had rather the highest pretension, because it originated under king William himself, in the very year of our great Revolution, When, in 1791, the parliament revoked the power of the magistracy to tender the test, they thereby virtually abrogated also the penal enactments upon the horse |