Whatever breeds discontent at this time will produce that great master-mischief most infallibly.  Whatever tends to persuade the people that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion that their interest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained to Jacobinism.  Whatever tends to irritate the talents of a country, which have at all times, and at these particularly, a mighty influence on the public mind, is of infinite service to that formidable cause.  Unless where Heaven has mingled uncommon ingredients of virtue in the composition,—­quos meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan,—­talents naturally gravitate to Jacobinism.  Whatever ill-humors are afloat in the state, they will be sure to discharge themselves in a mingled torrent in the Cloaca Maxima of Jacobinism.  Therefore people ought well to look about them.  First, the physicians are to take care that they do nothing to irritate this epidemical distemper.  It is a foolish thing to have the better of the patient in a dispute.  The complaint or its cause ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor.  They ought to be the ultima, not the prima, not the tota ratio of a wise government.  God forbid, that, on a worthy occasion, authority should want the means of force, or the disposition to use it!  But where a prudent and enlarged policy does not precede it, and attend it too, where the hearts of the better sort of people do not go with the hands of the soldiery, you may call your Constitution what you will, in effect it will consist of three parts, (orders, if you please,) cavalry, infantry, and artillery,—­and of nothing else or better.  I agree with you in your dislike of the discourses in Francis Street:  but I like as little some of those in College Green.  I am even less pleased with the temper that predominated in the latter, as better things might have been expected in the regular family mansion of public discretion than, in a new and hasty assembly of unexperienced men, congregated under circumstances of no small irritation.  After people have taken your tests, prescribed by yourselves as proofs of their allegiance, to be marked as enemies, traitors, or at best as suspected and dangerous persons, and that they are not to be believed on their oaths, we are not to be surprised, if they fall into a passion, and talk as men in a passion do, intemperately and idly.

The worst of the matter is this:  you are partly leading, partly driving into Jacobinism that description of your people whose religious principles, church polity, and habitual discipline might make them an invincible dike against that inundation.  This you have a thousand mattocks and pickaxes lifted up to demolish.  You make a sad story of the Pope. O seri studiorum!  It will not be difficult to get many called Catholics to laugh at this fundamental part of their religion.  Never doubt it.