Do not, I beseech you, ever mention to me again the name of Dr. Duigenan.  I have been in every corner of Ireland, and have studied its present strength and condition with no common labour.  Be assured Ireland does not contain at this moment less than 5,000,000 people.  There were returned in the year 1791 to the hearth tax 701,000 houses, and there is no kind of question that there were about 50,000 houses omitted in that return.  Taking, however, only the number returned for the tax, and allowing the average of six to a house (a very small average for a potato-fed people), this brings the population to 4,200,000 people in the year 1791:  and it can be shown from the clearest evidence (and Mr. Newenham in his book shows it), that Ireland for the last 50 years has increased in its population at the rate of 50,000 or 60,000 per annum; which leaves the present population of Ireland at about 5,000,000, after every possible deduction for existing circumstances, just and necessary wars, monstrous and unnatural rebellions, and all other sources of human destruction.  Of this population, two out of ten are Protestants; and the half of the Protestant population are dissenters, and as inimical to the Church as the Catholics themselves.  In this state of things thumbscrews and whipping—­admirable engines of policy as they must be considered to be—­will not ultimately avail.  The Catholics will hang over you; they will watch for the moment, and compel you hereafter to give them ten times as much, against your will, as they would now be contented with, if it were voluntarily surrendered.  Remember what happened in the American war, when Ireland compelled you to give her everything she asked, and to renounce, in the most explicit manner, your claim of sovereignty over her.  God Almighty grant the folly of these present men may not bring on such another crisis of public affairs!

What are your dangers which threaten the Establishment?  Reduce this declamation to a point, and let us understand what you mean.  The most ample allowance does not calculate that there would be more than twenty members who were Roman Catholics in one house, and ten in the other, if the Catholic emancipation were carried into effect.  Do you mean that these thirty members would bring in a bill to take away the tithes from the Protestant, and to pay them to the Catholic clergy?  Do you mean that a Catholic general would march his army into the House of Commons, and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr. Duigenan? or, that the theological writers would become all of a sudden more acute or more learned, if the present civil incapacities were removed?  Do you fear for your tithes, or your doctrines, or your person, or the English Constitution?  Every fear, taken separately, is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the boldness to state it.  Everyone conceals his ignorance, or his baseness, in a stupid general panic, which, when called on, he is utterly incapable of explaining.  Whatever