Ah, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, what ungrateful and disloyal miscreant could avoid loving a Constitution, and hugging to his grateful heart laws which showered down such blessings upon him, and upon all those who belong to a creed so favored?  But it would seem to have been felt that these laws had still a stronger claim upon their affections.  They would protect their religion as they did their property; and in order to attach them still more strongly, they shut up their places of worship—­they proscribed and banished and hung their clergy—­they hung or shot the unfortunate people who tied to worship God in the desert—­in mountain fastnesses and in caves, and threw their dead bodies to find a tomb in the entrails of the birds of the air, or the dogs which even persecution had made mad with hunger.  But again—­for this pleasing panorama is not yet closed, the happy Catholics, who must have danced with delight, under the privileges of such a Constitution, were deprived of the right to occupy and possess all civil offices—­their enterprise was crushed—­their industry made subservient to the rapacity of their enemies, and not to their own prosperity.  But this is far from being all.  The sources of knowledge—­of knowledge which only can enlighten and civilize the mind, prevent crime, and promote the progress of human society—­these sources of knowledge, I say, were sealed against them; they were consequently left to ignorance, and its inseparable associate—­vice.  All those noble principles which result from education, and which lead youth into those moral footsteps in which they should tread, were made criminal in the Catholic to pursue, and impossible to attain; and having thus been reduced by ignorance to the perpetration of those crimes which it uniformly produces—­the people were punished for that which oppressive laws had generated, and the ignorance which was forced upon them was turned into a penalty and a persecution.  They were first made ignorant by one Act of Parliament, and then punished by another for those crimes which ignorance produces.

“And now, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, it remains for me to take another view of the state and condition of this wretched country.  Perhaps there is not in the world so hideously a penal code of laws as that which appertains to the civil and religious rights of our unfortunate Roman Catholic countrymen.  It is not that this code is fierce, inhuman, unchristian, barbarous, and Draconic, and conceived in a spirit of blood—­because it might be all this, and yet, through the liberality and benevolence of those into whose hands it ought to be entrusted for administration, much of its dreadful spirit might be mitigated.  And I am bound to say that a large and important class of the Protestant community look upon such a code nearly with as much horror as the Catholics themselves.  Unfortunately, however, in every state of society and of law analogous to ours, a certain class of men, say rather of monsters,