As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding.  Liberty is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is pretended and assumed to destroy liberty.  The Catholic religion is completely free.  It has no establishment,—­but it is recognized, permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws.  If a man is satisfied to be a slave, he may be a Papist with perfect impunity.  He may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as an outlaw from the British Constitution.  If the constitutional liberty of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course would be taken.  The franchise would have been permitted, and the mass exterminated.  But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.

So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times.  Trusting wholly in their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext of the general good of the community.  They say, that, if the people, under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their property.  They tell us that they act only on the defensive.  They inform the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of people obtain votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in spite of the influence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole, or in far the major part, of Papists; that this Popish House of Commons will instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will not be in their power to save even by entering into that Popish party themselves, because there are prior claimants to be satisfied; that, as to the House of Lords, though neither Papists nor Protestants have a share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and disinterested as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful Protestant subjects; that they will be or are to be left, without house or land, to the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation with which they are threatened; that, therefore, they cannot so much as listen to any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional policy:  the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door.  See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of a sufficiently long perspective!