the evil.  If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristocratic interest, that is, an interest of property and education, amongst them,—­and to strengthen, by every prudent means, the authority and influence of men of that description.  It will deserve your best thoughts, to examine whether this can be done without giving such persons the means of demonstrating to the rest that something more is to be got by their temperate conduct than can be expected from the wild and senseless projects of those who do not belong to their body, who have no interest in their well-being, and only wish to make them the dupes of their turbulent ambition.

If the absurd persons you mention find no way of providing for liberty, but by overturning this happy Constitution, and introducing a frantic democracy, let us take care how we prevent better people from any rational expectations of partaking in the benefits of that Constitution as it stands.  The maxims you establish cut the matter short.  They have no sort of connection with the good or the ill behavior of the persons who seek relief, or with the proper or improper means by which they seek it.  They form a perpetual bar to all pleas and to all expectations.

You begin by asserting, that “the Catholics ought to enjoy all things under the state, but that they ought not to be the state”:  a position which, I believe, in the latter part of it, and in the latitude there expressed, no man of common sense has ever thought proper to dispute; because the contrary implies that the state ought to be in them exclusively.  But before you have finished the line, you express yourself as if the other member of your proposition, namely, that “they ought not to be a part of the state,” were necessarily included in the first,—­whereas I conceive it to be as different as a part is from the whole, that is, just as different as possible.  I know, indeed, that it is common with those who talk very differently from you, that is, with heat and animosity, to confound those things, and to argue the admission of the Catholics into any, however minute and subordinate, parts of the state, as a surrender into their hands of the whole government of the kingdom.  To them I have nothing at all to say.

Wishing to proceed with a deliberative spirit and temper in so very serious a question, I shall attempt to analyze, as well as I can, the principles you lay down, in order to fit them for the grasp of an understanding so little comprehensive as mine.—­“State,”—­“Protestant,”—­“Revolution.”  These are terms which, if not well explained, may lead us into many errors.  In the word State I conceive there is much ambiguity.  The state is sometimes used to signify the whole commonwealth, comprehending all its orders, with the several privileges belonging to each.  Sometimes it signifies only the higher and ruling part of the commonwealth,