worst

worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions. For very obvious reasons you cannot trust the Crown with a dispensing power over any of your laws. However, a government, 5 be it as bad as it may, will, in the exercise of a discretionary power, discriminate times and persons; and will not ordinarily pursue any man when its own safety is not concerned. A mercenary informer knows no distinction. Under such a system, the obnoxious people 10 are slaves, not only to the government, but they live at the mercy of every individual; they are at once the slaves of the whole community, and of every part of it; and the worst and most unmerciful men are those on whose goodness they most depend.

15

In this situation men not only shrink from the frowns of a stern magistrate, but they are obliged to fly from their very species. (The seeds of destruction are sown in civil intercourse, in social habitudes.) The blood of wholesome kindred is infected. Their tables and beds are 20 surrounded with snares. All the means given by Providence to make life safe and comfortable are perverted into instruments of terror and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and for- 25 tune, has such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal state of mind which alone can make us what we ought to be, that I vow to God I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so 30 to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and corrupting all about him.

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The Act repealed was of this direct tendency; and it was made in the manner which I have related to you. I will now tell you by whom the bill of repeal was brought into Parliament. I find it has been industriously given 5 out in this city (from kindness to me, unquestionably) that I was the mover or the seconder. The fact is, I did not once open my lips on the subject during the whole progress of the bill. I do not say this as disclaiming my share in that measure. Very far from it. I inform you 10 of this fact, lest I should seem to arrogate to myself the merits which belong to others. To have been the man chosen out to redeem our fellow-citizens from slavery, to purify our laws from absurdity and injustice, and to cleanse our religion from the blot and stain of persecu15 tion, would be an honor and happiness to which my wishes would undoubtedly aspire; but to which nothing but my wishes could possibly have entitled me. great work was in hands in every respect far better qualified than mine. The mover of the bill was Sir George 20 Savile.

That

When an act of great and signal humanity was to be done, and done with all the weight and authority that belonged to it, the world could cast its eyes upon none but him. I hope that few things which have a tendency 25 to bless or to adorn life have wholly escaped my observation in my passage through it. I have sought the acquaintance of that gentleman, and have seen him in all situations. He is a true genius; with an understanding vigorous, and acute, and refined, and distinguishing even 30 to excess, and illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of imagination. With these he possesses many external and instrumental advantages, and he makes use of them all. His fortune is among the largest; a fortune which, wholly unencumbered, as it is, 35 with one single charge from luxury, vanity, or excess,

sinks under the benevolence of its dispenser. This private benevolence, expanding itself into patriotism, renders his whole being the estate of the public, in which he has not reserved a peculium for himself of profit, diversion, or relaxation. During the session the first in 5 and the last out of the House of Commons, he passes from the senate to the camp; and seldom seeing the seat of his ancestors, he is always in the senate to serve his country, or in the field to defend it. But in all wellwrought compositions some particulars stand out more 10 eminently than the rest, and the things which will carry his name to posterity are his two bills -I mean that for a limitation of the claims of the Crown upon landed estates, and this for the relief of the Roman Catholics. By the former he has emancipated property; by the latter 15 he has quieted conscience; and by both he has taught that grand lesson to government and subject, no longer to regard each other as adverse parties.

Such was the mover of the Act that is complained of by men who are not quite so good as he is; an Act most 20 assuredly not brought in by him from any partiality to that sect which is the object of it. For, among his faults, I really cannot help reckoning a greater degree of prejudice against that people than becomes so wise a man. I know that he inclines to a sort of disgust, mixed with a 25 considerable degree of asperity, to the system; and he has few, or rather no habits with any of its professors. What he has done was on quite other motives. The motives were these, which he declared in his excellent speech on his motion for the bill; namely, his extreme 30 zeal to the Protestant religion, which he thought utterly disgraced by the Act of 1699, and his rooted hatred to all kind of oppression, under any color, or upon any pretence whatsoever.

The seconder was worthy of the mover, and of the 35

motion. I was not the seconder; it was Mr. Dunning, Recorder of this city. I shall say the less of him, because his near relation to you makes you more particularly acquainted with his merits. But I should them, or little sensible

5 appear little acquainted with

of them, if I could utter his name on this occasion without expressing my esteem for his character. I am not afraid of offending a most learned body, and most jealous of its reputation for that learning, when I say he 10 is the first of his profession. It is a point settled by those who settle everything else: and I must add (what I am enabled to say from my own long and close observation) that there is not a man of any profession, or in any situation, of a more erect and independent spirit; of 15 a more proud honor; a more manly mind; a more firm

20

and determined integrity. Assure yourselves, that the names of two such men will bear a great load of prejudice in the other scale before they can be entirely outweighed.

With this mover and this seconder agreed the wholeHouse of Commons; the whole House of Lords; the whole bench of bishops; the King; the Ministry; the Opposition; all the distinguished clergy of the establishment; all the eminent lights (for they were con25 sulted) of the dissenting churches. This according voice of national wisdom ought to be listened to with reverence. To say that all these descriptions of Englishmen unanimously concurred in a scheme for introducing the Catholic religion, or that none of them 30 understood the nature and effects of what they were doing so well as a few obscure clubs of people whose names you never heard of, is shamelessly absurd. Surely it is paying a miserable compliment to the religion we profess, to suggest that everything emi25 nent in the kingdom is indifferent, or even adverse, to

that religion, and that its security is wholly abandoned to the zeal of those who have nothing but their zeal to distinguish them. In weighing this unanimous concurrence of whatever the nation has to boast of, I hope you will recollect that all these concurring parties do by no 5 means love one another enough to agree in any point which was not both evidently and importantly right.

To prove this; to prove that the measure was both clearly and materially proper, I will next lay before you, as I promised, the political grounds and reasons for the 10 repeal of that penal statute, and the motives to its repeal at that particular time.

Gentlemen, America-when the English nation seemed to be dangerously, if not irrecoverably, divided; when one, and that the most growing branch, was torn from 15 the parent stock, and ingrafted on the power of France, a great terror fell upon this kingdom. On a sudden we awakened from our dreams of conquest, and saw ourselves threatened with an immediate invasion, which we were at that time very ill prepared to resist. You remember 20 the cloud that gloomed over us all. In that hour of our dismay, from the bottom of the hiding-places into which the indiscriminate rigor of our statutes had driven them, came out the body of the Roman Catholics. They appeared before the steps of a tottering throne with one of 25 the most sober, measured, steady, and dutiful addresses that was ever presented to the Crown. It was no holiday ceremony; no anniversary compliment of parade and show. It was signed by almost every gentleman of that persuasion, of note or property, in England. At such a 30 crisis, nothing but a decided resolution to stand or fall with their country could have dictated such an address, the direct tendency of which was to cut off all retreat, and to render them peculiarly obnoxious to an invader of their own communion. The address showed what I long 35