Even in England, where I admit the danger from the discontent of that persuasion to be less than in Ireland, yet even here, had we listened to the counsels of fanaticism and folly, we might have wounded ourselves very 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, 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 cities of Flanders, which, in the darkness of two hundred years ago, had been desolated by the superstition of a cruel tyrant.  Oar manufactures 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 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.

So far as to the effect of the act on the interests 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 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 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, an high office in the Austrian Netherlands.  Even the Lutheran obstinacy 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 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 far as it has waded into the shades of an eclipse, some beams of its former illumination still play upon its surface; and what