the most powerful law of Nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation. Everything

is provided for as it arrives.

This mode will, on the

one hand, prevent the unfixing old interests at once; a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration. This gradual course, on the other side, will prevent men, long under depression, from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with a licentious insolence. But wishing, as I do, the change to be gradual and cautious, I would in my first steps lean rather to the side of enlargement than restriction.

It is one excellence of our Constitution that all our rights of provincial election regard rather property than person. It is another that the rights which approach more nearly to the personal are most of them corporate, and suppose a restrained and strict education of seven years in some useful occupation. In both cases the practice may have slid from the principle. The standard of qualification in both cases may be so low, or not so judiciously chosen, as in some degree to frustrate the end. But all this is for your prudence in the

case before you.
qualification of the Catholic voters.
were to-morrow to put the Catholic freeholder on
the footing of the most favoured forty-shilling
Protestant Dissenter, you know that, such is the
actual state of Ireland, this would not make a sensible
alteration in almost any one election in the kingdom.
The effect in their favour, even defensively, would be
infinitely slow. But it would be healing; it would
be satisfactory and protecting. The stigma would be
removed. By admitting settled permanent substance
in lieu of the numbers, you would avoid the great
danger of our time, that of setting up number against
property. The numbers ought never to be neglected
because (besides what is due to them as men) collec-
tively, though not individually, they have great
property: they ought to have therefore protection,
they ought to have security, they ought to have
even consideration; but they ought not to pre-
dominate.

You may rise a step or two the
But if you

My dear Sir, I have nearly done. I meant to write you a long letter; I have written a long dissertation. I might have done it earlier and better. I might have been more forcible and more clear, if I had not been interrupted as I have been; and this obliges me not to write to you in my own hand. Though my hand but signs it, my heart goes with what I have written. Since I could think at all, those have been my thoughts. You know that

thirty-two years ago they were as fully matured in my mind as they are now. A letter of mine to Lord Kenmare, though not by my desire, and full of lesser mistakes, has been printed in Dublin. It was written ten or twelve years ago, at the time when I began the employment, which I have not yet finished, in favour of another distressed people, injured by those who have vanquished them, or stolen a dominion over them. It contained my sentiments then; you will see how far they accord with my sentiments now. Time has more and more confirmed me in them all. The present circumstances fix them deeper in my mind.

I voted last session, if a particular vote could be distinguished, in unanimity, for an establishment of the Church of England conjointly with the establishment, which was made some years before by Act of Parliament, of the Roman Catholic, in the French conquered country of Canada. At the time of making this English ecclesiastical establishment, we did not think it necessary for its safety to destroy the former Gallican Church settlement. In our first Act we settled a government altogether monarchical, or nearly so. In that system the Canadian Catholics were far from being deprived of the advantages or distinctions, of any kind, which they enjoyed under their former monarchy. It is true that some people, and amongst them one eminent divine, predicted at that time that by this step we

should lose our dominions in America.

He foretold

that the Pope would send his indulgences thither; that the Canadians would fall in with France, would declare independence, and draw or force our colonies into the same design. The independence happened according to his prediction; but in directly the reverse order. All our English Protestant colonies revolted. They joined themselves to France; and it so happened that Popish Canada was the only place which preserved its fidelity; the only place in which France got no footing; the only peopled colony which now remains to Great Britain. Vain are all the prognostics taken from ideas and passions which survive the state of things which gave rise to them. When last year we gave a popular representation to the same Canada, by the choice of the landholders and an aristocratic representation, at the choice of the Crown, neither was the choice of the Crown nor the election of the landholders limited by a consideration of religion. We had no dread for the Protestant Church, which we settled there, because we permitted the French Catholics, in the utmost latitude of the description, to be free subjects. They are good subjects, I have no doubt; but I will not allow that any French Canadian Catholics are better men or better citizens than the Irish of the same communion. Passing from the extremity of the West to the extremity almost of the East, I have been many years (now

entering into the twelfth) employed in supporting the rights, privileges, laws, and immunities of a very remote people. I have not as yet been able to finish my task. I have struggled through much discouragement and much opposition, much obloquy, much calumny, for a people with whom I have no tie but the common bond of mankind. In this I have not been left alone. We did not fly from our undertaking because the people are Mahometans or Pagans, and that a great majority of the Christians amongst them are Papists. Some gentlemen in Ireland, I dare say, have good reasons for what they may do, which do not occur to me. I do not presume to condemn them; but, thinking and acting as I have done towards these remote nations, I should not know how to show my face, here or in Ireland, if I should say that all the Pagans, all the Mussulmen, and even all the Papists (since they must form the highest stage in the climax of evil) are worthy of a liberal and honourable condition, except those of one of the descriptions, which forms the majority of the inhabitants of the country in which you and I were born. If such are the Catholics of Ireland, illnatured and unjust people, from our own data, may be inclined not to think better of the Protestants of a soil which is supposed to infuse into its sects a kind of venom unknown in other places.

You hated the old system as early as I did. Your first juvenile lance was broken against that