by the second civil article, that every person actually residing in any fortress occupied by an Irish garrison, should be permitted, on taking the Oath of Allegiance, to resume any calling which he had exercised before the Revolution.  It would, beyond all doubt, have been a violation of this covenant to require that a lawyer or a physician, who had been within the walls of Limerick during the siege, should take the Oath of Supremacy and subscribe the Declaration against Transubstantiation, before he could receive fees.  Holt was consulted, and was directed to prepare clauses in conformity with the terms of the capitulation.

The bill, as amended by Holt, was sent back to the Commons.  They at first rejected the amendment, and demanded a conference.  The conference was granted.  Rochester, in the Painted Chamber, delivered to the managers of the Lower House a copy of the Treaty of Limerick, and earnestly represented the importance of preserving the public faith inviolate.  This appeal was one which no honest man, though inflamed by national and religious animosity, could resist.  The Commons reconsidered the subject, and, after hearing the Treaty read, agreed, with some slight modifications, to what the Lords had proposed.151

The bill became a law.  It attracted, at the time, little notice, but was, after the lapse of several generations, the subject of a very acrimonious controversy.  Many of us can well remember how strongly the public mind was stirred, in the days of George the Third and George the Fourth, by the question whether Roman Catholics should be permitted to sit in Parliament.  It may be doubted whether any dispute has produced stranger perversions of history.  The whole past was falsified for the sake of the present.  All the great events of three centuries long appeared to us distorted and discoloured by a mist sprung from our own theories and our own passions.  Some friends of religious liberty, not content with the advantage which they possessed in the fair conflict of reason with reason, weakened their case by maintaining that the law which excluded Irish Roman Catholics from Parliament was inconsistent with the civil Treaty of Limerick.  The First article of that Treaty, it was said, guaranteed to the Irish Roman Catholic such privileges in the exercise of his religion as he had enjoyed in the time of Charles the Second.  In the time of Charles the Second no test excluded Roman Catholics from the Irish Parliament.  Such a test could not therefore, it was argued, be imposed without a breach of public faith.  In the year 1828, especially, this argument was put forward in the House of Commons as if it had been the main strength of a cause which stood in need of no such support.  The champions of Protestant ascendency were well pleased to see the debate diverted from a political question about which they were in the wrong, to a historical question about which they were in the right.  They had no difficulty in proving that the first article, as understood by