lasting power; but the frequent recurrence of an application for favors will revive and refresh it, and will necessarily produce some degree of mutual attention.  It will produce, at least, acquaintance.  The several descriptions of people will not be kept so much apart as they now are, as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species.  The stigma and reproach, the hideous mask will be taken off, and men will see each other as they are.  Sure I am that there have been thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen, or to ask their way, when they had lost it in their sports,—­or, at best, who had known them only as footmen, or other domestics, of the second and third order:  and so averse were they, some time ago, to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stable.  I well remember a great, and in many respects a good man, who advertised for a blacksmith, but at the same time added, he must be a Protestant.  It is impossible that such a state of things, though natural goodness in many persons will undoubtedly make exceptions, must not produce alienation on the one side and pride and insolence on the other.

Reduced to a question of discretion, and that discretion exercised solely upon what will appear best for the conservation of the state on its present basis, I should recommend it to your serious thoughts, whether the narrowing of the foundation is always the best way to secure the building?  The body of disfranchised men will not be perfectly satisfied to remain always in that state.  If they are not satisfied, you have two millions of subjects in your bosom full of uneasiness:  not that they cannot overturn the Act of Settlement, and put themselves and you under an arbitrary master; or that they are not permitted to spawn a hydra of wild republics, on principles of a pretended natural equality in man; but because you will not suffer them to enjoy the ancient, fundamental, tried advantages of a British Constitution,—­that you will not permit them to profit of the protection of a common father or the freedom of common citizens, and that the only reason which can be assigned for this disfranchisement has a tendency more deeply to ulcerate their minds than the act of exclusion itself.  What the consequence of such feelings must be it is for you to look to.  To warn is not to menace.

I am far from asserting that men will not excite disturbances without just cause.  I know that such an assertion is not true.  But neither is it true that disturbances have never just complaints for their origin.  I am sure that it is hardly prudent to furnish them with such causes of complaint as every man who thinks the British Constitution a benefit may think at least colorable and plausible.

Several are in dread of the manoeuvres of certain persons among the Dissenters, who turn this ill humor to their own ill purposes.  You know, better than I can, how much these proceedings of certain among the Dissenters are to be feared.  You are to weigh, with the temper which is natural to you, whether it may be for the safety of our establishment that the Catholics should be ultimately persuaded that they have no hope to enter into the Constitution but through the Dissenters.