know to the contrary, (in the dark as I am about the Protestant Dissenting tenets,) might be of use to the health of their souls.  But what security our Constitution, in Church or State, could derive from that event, I cannot possibly discern.  Depend upon it, it is as true as Nature is true, that, if you force them out of the religion of habit, education, or opinion, it is not to yours they will ever go.  Shaken in their minds, they will go to that where the dogmas are fewest,—­where they are the most uncertain,—­where they lead them the least to a consideration of what they have abandoned.  They will go to that uniformly democratic system to whose first movements they owed their emancipation.  I recommend you seriously to turn this in your mind.  Believe that it requires your best and maturest thoughts.  Take what course you please,—­union or no union; whether the people remain Catholics or become Protestant Dissenters, sure it is that the present state of monopoly cannot continue.

If England were animated, as I think she is not, with her former spirit of domination, and with the strong theological hatred which she once cherished for that description of her fellow-Christians and fellow-subjects, I am yet convinced, that, after the fullest success in a ruinous struggle, you would be obliged to abandon that monopoly.  We were obliged to do this, even when everything promised success, in the American business.  If you should make this experiment at last, under the pressure of any necessity, you never can do it well.  But if, instead of falling into a passion, the leading gentlemen of the country themselves should undertake the business cheerfully, and with hearty affection towards it, great advantages would follow.  What is forced cannot be modified:  but here you may measure your concessions.

It is a consideration of great moment, that you make the desired admission without altering the system of your representation in the smallest degree or in any part.  You may leave that deliberation of a Parliamentary change or reform, if ever you should think fit to engage in it, uncomplicated and unembarrassed with the other question.  Whereas, if they are mixed and confounded, as some people attempt to mix and confound them, no one can answer for the effects on the Constitution itself.

There is another advantage in taking up this business singly and by an arrangement for the single object.  It is that you may proceed by degrees.  We must all obey the great law of change.  It is the most powerful law of Nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.  All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees.  This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.  Everything is provided for as it arrives.  This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing old interests at once:  a thing which is apt to breed a