A BILL FOR THE RELIEF OF THE ROMAN CATHOLICS OF IRELAND.

JULY 18, 1778.

NOTE.

This Letter is addressed to Mr. Pery, (afterwards Lord Pery,) then Speaker of the House of Commons of Ireland.  It appears, there had been much correspondence between that gentleman and Mr. Burke, on the subject of Heads of a bill (which had passed the Irish House of Commons in the summer of the year 1778, and had been transmitted by the Irish Privy Council of [to?] England) for the relief of his Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects in Ireland.  The bill contained a clause for exempting the Protestant Dissenters of Ireland from the sacramental test, which created a strong objection to the whole measure on the part of the English government.  Mr. Burke employed his most strenuous efforts to remove the prejudice which the king’s ministers entertained against the clause, but the bill was ultimately returned without it, and in that shape passed the Irish Parliament. (17th and 18th Geo. III cap. 49.) In the subsequent session, however, a separate act was passed for the relief of the Protestant Dissenters of Ireland.

LETTER.

My Dear Sir,—­I received in due course your two very interesting and judicious letters, which gave me many new lights, and excited me to fresh activity in the important subject they related to.  However, from that time I have not been perfectly free from doubt and uneasiness.  I used a liberty with those letters, which, perhaps, nothing can thoroughly justify, and which certainly nothing but the delicacy of the crisis, the clearness of my intentions, and your great good-nature can at all excuse.  I might conceal this from you; but I think it better to lay the whole matter before you, and submit myself to your mercy,—­assuring you, at the same time, that, if you are so kind as to continue your confidence on this, or to renew it upon any other occasion, I shall never be tempted again to make so bold and unauthorized an use of the trust you place in me.  I will state to you the history of the business since my last, and then you will see how far I am excusable by the circumstances.

On the 3rd of July I received a letter from the Attorney-General, dated the day before, in which, in a very open and obliging manner, he desires my thoughts of the Irish Toleration Bill, and particularly of the Dissenters’ clause.  I gave them to him, by the return of the post, at large; but, as the time pressed, I kept no copy of the letter.  The general drift was strongly to recommend the whole, and principally to obviate the objections to the part that related to the Dissenters, with regard both to the general propriety and to the temporary policy at this juncture.  I took, likewise, a good deal of pains to state the difference which had always subsisted with regard to the treatment of the Protestant Dissenters in Ireland and in England, and what I conceived the reason of