with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and, if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible.  You speak of danger to the Establishment; I request to know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits, were half so terrible?...  Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are—­you cannot get rid of them.  Your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one.  If you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in Westminster.  Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party.  I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it.”

A noble lord—­his name unluckily has perished—­had attempted to salve his own conscience and that of his colleagues in hostility to the Roman claims, by affirming that exclusion from civil office was not persecution; and Peter handles him with delighted vigour, in a passage which, more than eighty years later, was quoted with enthusiasm by Mr. Gladstone.[45]—­

“A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble noblemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of political power; whereas there is no more distinction between these two things than there is between him who makes the distinction and a booby.  If I strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic and give him twenty stripes, I persecute.  If I say, ’Everybody in the town where you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable offices but you, who are a Catholic,’ I do not persecute!  What barbarous nonsense is this!  As if degradation was not as great an evil as bodily pain, or as severe poverty; as if I could not be as great a tyrant by saying, ‘You shall not enjoy,’ as by saying, ’You shall suffer.’...  You may not be aware of it, most reverend Abraham, but you deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry dumpling.  She values her receipts, not because they secure to her a certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want it—­a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable when it narrows the boon of religious freedom.”

Letter III. gives utterance to a genuine alarm inspired by Bonaparte’s uninterrupted progress.  England is confronted by the most formidable adversary whom she has ever known, and her defence is entrusted to Canning and Perceval.  Canning’s armoury contains nothing more serviceable than “schoolboy jokes and doggerel rhymes, an affronting petulance, and the tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt.”  Perceval, instead of looking after the national defences,