deeply, and wounded ourselves in a very tender part. You are apprised that the Catholics of England consist mostly of our best manufacturers. Had the legislature chosen, instead of returning their declarations of duty with correspondent good-will, to drive them to despair, 5 there is a country at their very door to which they would be invited, a country in all respects as good as ours, and with the finest cities in the world ready built to receive them. And thus the bigotry of a free country, and in an enlightened age, would have repeopled the 10 cities of Flanders, which, in the darkness of two hundred years ago, had been desolated by the superstition of a cruel tyrant. Our manufacturers were the growth of the persecutions in the Low Countries. What a spectacle would it be to Europe to see us at this time of day 15 balancing the account of tyranny with those very countries, and by our persecutions driving back trade and manufacture, as a sort of vagabonds, to their original settlement ! But I trust we shall be saved this last of disgraces.

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So far as to the effect of the Act on the interest of this nation. With regard to the interests of mankind at large I am sure the benefit was very considerable. Long before this Act, indeed, the spirit of toleration began to gain ground in Europe. In Holland, the third part of the 25 people are Catholics; they live at ease, and are a sound part of the State. In many parts of Germany, Protestants and Papists partake the same cities, the same councils, and even the same churches. The unbounded liberality of the King of Prussia's conduct on this occasion is 30 known to all the world; and it is of a piece with the other grand maxims of his reign. The magnanimity of the imperial court, breaking through the narrow principles of its predecessors, has indulged its Protestant subjects not only with property, with worship, with

liberal education- but with honors and trusts, both civil and military. A worthy Protestant gentleman of this country now fills, and fills with credit, a high office in the Austrian Netherlands. Even the Lutheran obstinacy 5 of Sweden has thawed at length, and opened a toleration to all religions. I know myself that in France the Protestants begin to be at rest. The army, which in that country is everything, is open to them; and some of the military rewards and decorations which the laws deny, 10 are supplied by others to make the service acceptable and honorable. The first Minister of Finance in that country is a Protestant. Two years' war without a tax is among the first-fruits of their liberality. Tarnished as the glory of this nation is, and as far as it has waded into 15 the shades of an eclipse, some beams of its former illumination still play upon its surface; and what is done in England is still looked to as argument and as example. It is certainly true that no law of this country ever met with such universal applause abroad, or was so likely to 20 produce the perfection of that tolerating spirit, which, as I observed, has been long gaining ground in Europe; for abroad, it was universally thought that we had done what, I am sorry to say, we had not; they thought we had granted a full toleration. That opinion was, however, 25 so far from hurting the Protestant cause that I declare, with the most serious solemnity, my firm belief that no one thing done for these fifty years past was so likely to prove deeply beneficial to our religion at large as Sir George Savile's act. In its effects it was "an Act 30 for tolerating and protecting Protestantism throughout Europe;" and I hope that those who were taking steps for the quiet and settlement of our Protestant brethren in other countries will, even yet, rather consider the steady equity of the greater and better part of the people of · 35 Great Britain, than the vanity and violence of a few.

I perceive, gentlemen, by the manner of all about me, that you look with horror on the wicked clamor which has been raised on this subject; and that instead of an apology for what was done, you rather demand from me an account why the execution of the scheme of tolera- 5 tion was not made more answerable to the large and liberal grounds on which it was taken up? The question is natural and proper; and I remember that a great and learned magistrate, distinguished for his strong and systematic understanding, and who at that time was a 10 member of the House of Commons, made the same objection to the proceeding. The statutes, as they now stand, are, without doubt, perfectly absurd. But I beg leave to explain the cause of this gross imperfection in the tolerating plan, as well and as shortly as I am able. It was 15 universally thought that the session ought not to pass over without doing something in this business. To revise the whole body of the penal statutes was conceived to be an object too big for the time. The penal statute, therefore, which was chosen for repeal (chosen to show 20 our disposition to conciliate, not to perfect a toleration) was this Act of ludicrous cruelty, of which I have just given you the history. It is an Act which, though not by a great deal so fierce and bloody as some of the rest, was infinitely more ready in the execution. It was the 25 Act which gave the greatest encouragement to those pests of society, mercenary informers and interested disturbers of household peace; and it was observed with truth that the prosecutions, either carried to conviction or compounded, for many years, had been all commenced upon 30 that Act. It was said that, whilst we were deliberating on a more perfect scheme, the spirit of the age would never come up to the execution of the statutes which remained, especially as more steps, and a co-operation of more minds and powers were required towards a mischiev- 35

ous use of them, than for the execution of the Act to be repealed; that it was better to unravel this texture from below than from above, beginning with the latest, which, in general practice, is the severest evil. It was alleged 5 that this slow proceeding would be attended with the advantage of a progressive experience; and that the people would grow reconciled to toleration, when they should find by the effects that justice was not so irreconcilable an enemy to convenience as they had imagined.

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These, gentlemen, were the reasons why we left this good work in the rude, unfinished state in which good works are commonly left through the tame circumspection with which a timid prudence so frequently enervates beneficence. In doing good, we are generally cold, and 15 languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand, touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our 20 energies whenever we oppress and persecute.

Thus this matter was left for the time, with a full determination in Parliament not to suffer other and worse statutes to remain for the purpose of counteracting the benefits proposed by the repeal of one penal law; 25 for nobody then dreamed of defending what was done. for a benefit, on the ground of its being no benefit at all. We were not then ripe for so mean a subterfuge.

I do not wish to go over the horrid scene that was afterwards acted. Would to God it could be expunged 30 forever from the annals of this country! But since it must subsist for our shame, let it subsist for our instruction. In the year 1780, there were found in this nation men deluded enough (for I give the whole to their delusion), on pretences of zeal and piety, without any sort 35 of provocation whatsoever, real or pretended, to make a

desperate attempt, which would have consumed all the glory and power of this country in the flames of London, and buried all law, order, and religion under the ruins of the metropolis of the Protestant world. Whether all this mischief done, or in the direct train of doing, was in 5 their original scheme, I cannot say I hope it was not; but this would have been the unavoidable consequence of their proceedings had not the flames they had lighted up in their fury been extinguished in their blood.

All the time that this horrid scene was acting or 10 avenging, as well as for sometime before, and ever since, the wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cowardly darkness from their punishment, continued without interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the 15 blind rage of the populace with a continued blast of pestilential libels, which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in.

The main drift of all the libels, and all the riots, was to force Parliament (to persuade us was hopeless) into 20 an act of national perfidy which has no example. For, gentlemen, it is proper you should all know what infamy we escaped by refusing that repeal, for a refusal of which, it seems, I, among others, stand somewhere or other accused. When we took away, on the motives 25 which I had the honor of stating to you, a few of the innumerable penalties upon an oppressed and injured people, the relief was not absolute, but given on a stipulation and compact between them and us; for we bound down the Roman Catholics with the most solemn oaths 30 to bear true allegiance to this government, to abjure all sort of temporal power in any other, and to renounce, under the same solemn obligations, the doctrines of systematic perfidy with which they stood (I conceive very unjustly) charged. Now our modest petitioners came 35