In 1774, Burke was called upon by the citizens of Bristol to represent them in Parliament, and he presented a petition from them to the House in favour of American independence; but, with the singular inconsistency of their nation, they refused to re-elect him in 1780, because he advocated Catholic Emancipation.

The same principle of justice which made Burke take the side of America against England, or rather made him see that it would be the real advantage of England to conciliate America, made him also take the side of liberty on the Catholic question.  The short-sighted and narrow-minded politicians who resisted the reasonable demands of a colony until it was too late to yield, were enabled, unfortunately, to resist more effectually the just demands of several millions of their own people.

It is unquestionably one of the strangest of mental phenomena, that persons who make liberty of conscience their boast and their watchword, should be the first to violate their own principles, and should be utterly unable to see the conclusion of their own favourite premises.  If liberty of conscience mean anything, it must surely mean perfect freedom of religious belief for all; and such freedom is certainly incompatible with the slightest restraint, with the most trifling penalty for difference of opinion on such subjects.  Again, Burke had recourse to the argumentum ad hominum, the only argument which those with whom he had to deal seemed capable of comprehending.

“After the suppression of the great rebellion of Tyrconnel by William of Orange,” writes Mr. Morley,[568] “ascendency began in all its vileness and completeness.  The Revolution brought about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England.  Here it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of a small sect; there it made a small sect supreme over the body of the nation.”  This is in fact an epitome of Irish history since the so-called Reformation in England, and this was the state of affairs which Burke was called to combat.  On all grounds the more powerful party was entirely against him.  The merchants of Manchester and Bristol, for whose supposed benefit Irish trade had been ruined, wished to keep up the ascendency, conceiving it to be the surest way of replenishing their coffers.  The majority of Irish landlords, who looked always to their own immediate interest, and had none of the far-sighted policy which would enable them to see that the prosperity of the tenant would, in the end, most effectively secure the prosperity of the landlord, were also in favour of ascendency, which promised to satisfy their land hunger, and their miserable greed of gain.  The Protestant Church was in favour of ascendency:  why should it not be, since its ministers could only derive support from a people who hated them alike for their creed and their oppressions, at the point of the sword and by the “brotherly agency of the tithe-procter,” who, if he did not assist in spreading the Gospel, at least took care that its so-called ministers should lack no luxury which could be wrung from a starving and indignant people?[569]