as not democratic enough, appealing to the labouring classes, execrating the tyranny of the ten-pound householders, and exchanging compliments and caresses with the most noted incendiaries of our time.  The cry of universal toleration was employed by James, just as the cry of universal suffrage was lately employed by some veteran Tories.  The object of the mock democrats of our time was to produce a conflict between the middle classes and the multitude, and thus to prevent all reform.  The object of James was to produce a conflict between the Church and the Protestant Dissenters, and thus to facilitate the victory of the Catholics over both.

We do not believe that he could have succeeded.  But we do not think his plan so utterly frantic and hopeless as it has generally been thought; and we are sure that, if he had been allowed to gain his first point, the people would have had no remedy left but an appeal to physical force, which would have been made under most unfavourable circumstances.  He conceived that the Tories, hampered by their professions of passive obedience, would have submitted to his pleasure, and that the Dissenters, seduced by his delusive promises of relief, would have given him strenuous support.  In this way he hoped to obtain a law, nominally for the removal of all religious disabilities, but really for the excluding of all Protestants from all offices.  It is never to be forgotten that a prince who has all the patronage of the State in his hands can, without violating the letter of the law, establish whatever test he chooses.  And, from the whole conduct of James, we have not the smallest doubt that he would have availed himself of his power to the utmost.  The statute-book might declare all Englishmen equally capable of holding office; but to what end, if all offices were in the gift of a sovereign resolved not to employ a single heretic?  We firmly believe that not one post in the government, in the army, in the navy, on the bench, or at the bar, not one peerage, nay not one ecclesiastical benefice in the royal gift, would have been bestowed on any Protestant of any persuasion.  Even while the King had still strong motives to dissemble, he had made a Catholic Dean of Christ Church and a Catholic President of Magdalen College.  There seems to be no doubt that the See of York was kept vacant for another Catholic.  If James had been suffered to follow this course for twenty years, every military man from a general to a drummer, every officer of a ship, every judge, every King’s counsel, every lord-lieutenant of a county, every justice of the peace, every ambassador, every minister of state, every person employed in the royal household, in the custom-house, in the post-office, in the excise, would have been a Catholic.  The Catholics would have had a majority in the House of Lords, even if that majority had been made, as Sunderland threatened, by bestowing coronets on a whole troop of the Guards.  Catholics would have had, we believe,