great gate, for having been invited to enter into it by a postern, will you punish by deprivation of their privileges, or mulet in any other way, those who have tempted us?—­Far from it;—­we mean to preserve all their liberties and immunities, as our life-blood.  We mean to cultivate them, as brethren whom we love and respect;—­with you we have no fellowship.  We can bear with patience their enmity to ourselves; but their friendship with you we will not endure.  But mark it well!  All our quarrels with them are always to be revenged upon you.  Formerly, it is notorious that we should have resented with the highest indignation your presuming to show any ill-will to them.  You must not suffer them, now, to show any good-will to you.  Know—­and take it once for all—­that it is, and ever has been, and ever will be, a fundamental maxim in our politics, that you are not to have any part or shadow or name of interest whatever in our state; that we look upon you as under an irreversible outlawry from our Constitution,—­as perpetual and unalliable aliens.

Such, my dear Sir, is the plain nature of the argument drawn from the Revolution maxims, enforced by a supposed disposition in the Catholics to unite with the Dissenters.  Such it is, though it were clothed in never such bland and civil forms, and wrapped up, as a poet says, in a thousand “artful folds of sacred lawn.”  For my own part, I do not know in what manner to shape such arguments, so as to obtain admission for them into a rational understanding.  Everything of this kind is to be reduced at last to threats of power.  I cannot say, Vae victis! and then throw the sword into the scale.  I have no sword; and if I had, in this case, most certainly, I would not use it as a makeweight in political reasoning.

Observe, on these principles, the difference between the procedure of the Parliament and the Dissenters towards the people in question.  One employs courtship, the other force.  The Dissenters offer bribes, the Parliament nothing but the front negatif of a stern and forbidding authority.  A man may be very wrong in his ideas of what is good for him.  But no man affronts me, nor can therefore justify my affronting him, by offering to make me as happy as himself, according to his own ideas of happiness.  This the Dissenters do to the Catholics.  You are on the different extremes.  The Dissenters offer, with regard to constitutional rights and civil advantages of all sorts, everything; you refuse everything.  With them, there is boundless, though not very assured hope; with you, a very sure and very unqualified despair.  The terms of alliance from the Dissenters offer a representation of the commons, chosen out of the people by the head.  This is absurdly and dangerously large, in my opinion; and that scheme of election is known to have been at all times perfectly odious to me.  But I cannot think it right of course to