From my best observation, I should greatly doubt, whether, in the end, these gentlemen would obtain their object, so as to make the exclusion of two millions of their countrymen a fundamental article in the union.  The demand would be of a nature quite unprecedented.  You might obtain the union; and yet a gentleman, who, under the new union establishment, would aspire to the honor of representing his county, might possibly be as much obliged, as he may fear to be under the old separate establishment, to the unsupportable mortification of asking his neighbors, who have a different opinion concerning the elements in the sacrament, for their votes.

I believe, nay, I am sure, that the people of Great Britain, with or without an union, might be depended upon, in oases of any real danger, to aid the government of Ireland, with the same cordiality as they would support their own, against any wicked attempts to shake the security of the happy Constitution in Church and State.  But before Great Britain engages in any quarrel, the cause of the dispute would certainly be a part of her consideration.  If confusions should arise in that kingdom from too steady an attachment to a proscriptive, monopolizing system, and from the resolution of regarding the franchise, and in it the security of the subject, as belonging rather to religious opinions than to civil qualification and civil conduct, I doubt whether you might quite certainly reckon on obtaining an aid of force from hence for the support of that system.  We might extend your distractions to this country by taking part in them.  England will be indisposed, I suspect, to send an army for the conquest of Ireland.  What was done in 1782 is a decisive proof of her sentiments of justice and moderation.  She will not be fond of making another American war in Ireland.  The principles of such a war would but too much resemble the former one.  The well-disposed and the ill-disposed in England would (for different reasons perhaps) be equally averse to such an enterprise.  The confiscations, the public auctions, the private grants, the plantations, the transplantations, which formerly animated so many adventurers, even among sober citizens, to such Irish expeditions, and which possibly might have animated some of them to the American, can have no existence in the case that we suppose.

Let us form a supposition, (no foolish or ungrounded supposition,) that, in an age when men are infinitely more disposed to heat themselves with political than religious controversies, the former should entirely prevail, as we see that in some places they have prevailed, over the latter,—­and that the Catholics of Ireland, from the courtship paid them on the one hand, and the high tone of refusal on the other, should, in order to enter into all the rights of subjects, all become Protestant Dissenters, and, as the others do, take all your oaths.  They would all obtain their civil objects; and the change, for anything I