times, too often means—­God save my pension and my place, God give my sisters an allowance out of the Privy Purse—­make me Clerk of the Irons, let me survey the Meltings, let me live upon the fruits of other men’s industry, and fatten upon the plunder of the public.”

This brings us again to the “sepulchral Spencer Perceval,” as he is called in another place, with his enormous emoluments from the public purse, his dream of pacifying Ireland by converting its inhabitants to Protestantism, and his fantastic policy of the Orders in Council.—­

“He would bring the French to reason by keeping them without rhubarb, and exhibit to mankind the awful spectacle of a nation deprived of neutral salts.  This is not the dream of a wild apothecary indulging in his own opium; this is not the distempered fancy of a pounder of drugs, delirious from smallness of profits—­but it is the sober, deliberate, and systematic scheme of a man to whom the public safety is entrusted, and whose appointment is considered by many as a masterpiece of political sagacity.”

And now, having exhausted the “Catholic Question” as it presents itself in England and Ireland, Peter Plymley (who has already called attention to the religious liberty established in France) cites the cases of Switzerland and Hungary as illustrating the civil strength of nations free from the legalized animosities of religion.  Did Frederick the Great ever refuse the services of a Catholic soldier?  There is a Catholic Secretary of State at St. Petersburgh.  There was a Greek Patriarch associated with a Vicar-Apostolic in the government of Venice.  A Catholic Emperor has entrusted the command of his guard to a Protestant Prince.  But what signifies all this to Spencer Perceval?  He looks at human nature from the top of Hampstead Hill, and has not a thought beyond the sphere of his own vision.  And so we reach the conclusion of the whole matter.—­

“I now take a final leave of this subject of Ireland.  The only difficulty in discussing it is a want of resistance—­a want of something difficult to unravel and something dark to illumine.  To agitate such a question is to beat the air with a club, and cut down gnats with a scimitar:  it is a prostitution of industry, and a waste of strength.  If a man says, ’I have a good place, and I do not choose to lose it,’ this mode of arguing upon the Catholic Question I can well understand.  But that any human being with an understanding two degrees elevated above that of an Anabaptist preacher should conscientiously contend for the expediency and propriety of leaving the Irish Catholics in their present state, and of subjecting us to such tremendous peril in the present condition of the world, it is utterly out of my power to conceive.  Such a measure as the Catholic Question is entirely beyond the common game of politics.  It is a measure in which all parties ought to acquiesce, in order to preserve the place where and the stake for which they play.