that they would forbear to employ any power which they might acquire for the service of a prince of their own religion.  That danger, however, which ever since 1745 had been a very shadowy one, had wholly passed away with the life of the last Stuart lay prince, Charles Edward; and his death left the rulers of the kingdom and advisers of the sovereign free to take a different and larger view of their duty to the nation as a whole.

It was notorious that the number of Non-conformists was large.  In the middle of the last century it had received a considerable accession through the institution of the new sect of Wesleyan Methodists; which, through the supineness of the clergy of the Established Church in that generation, had gradually increased, till it was estimated that the various Dissenting sects in England equalled at least half the number of the members of the Established Church.  In Wales they were believed to form the majority.  In Scotland three-fourths of the people were Presbyterians; and in Ireland the Roman Catholics outnumbered the Protestants in nearly the same proportion.  Taking England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland together, a calculation which reckoned the different sects of Protestant and Roman Catholic Non-conformists united at half the entire population would probably not have erred very widely from the truth.

It must have been the aim of every statesman deserving of the name to weld these different religious parties into one harmonious whole, as far as their civil position went.  And measures which had that tendency could not be foreign to the constitution, properly understood.  A constitution which confines its benefits to one-half of a nation hardly merits the title of a constitution at all.  For every constitution ought to extend its protection and its privileges equally to every portion of the people, unless there be some peculiarity in the principles or habits of any one portion which makes its participation in them dangerous to the rest.  It had undoubtedly been the doctrine of Pitt, and of the greater part of those who since his time had held the reins of government, that if any portion of the King’s subjects did cherish a temper dangerous to the rest, it was because they were debarred from privileges to which they conceived themselves to have a just right, and that their discontent and turbulence were the fruit of the restrictions imposed on them.  In proposing to remove such a grievance Pitt certainly conceived himself to be acting in accordance with the strictest principles of the constitution, and not so much innovating upon it as restoring it to its original comprehensiveness.  And so of the measure, as it was now carried, it will apparently be correct to say that, though it did make an important change in the practical working of the constitution, it made it only by reverting to the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, to which every subject had a right; which had only been temporarily restrained under the apprehension of danger to the state, and which the cessation of that apprehension made it a duty to re-establish in all their fulness.