vated form, of angry dissensions now happily gliding into decay and disuse. If the consequence of this alteration of the constitution should be accompanied with an alteration in the duration of parliaments-if, instead of sitting for seven years, they were to sit but for three, then again would the more frequent collision of protestant and catholic furnish a still greater accession of violent matter to keep alive domestic dissension, in every form in which it could be arrayed against the internal peace and concord of the country. These were his honest sentiments upon this great important question. They were uninfluenced by any motive but an ardent anxiety for the durability of the constitution. He spoke his own sentiments, without attending to the apprehensions of others, for he had taken no pains to collect what might elsewhere be the feeling of persons who thought upon this subject. Much had been said, both upon this and another subject, of the opinions which prevailed out of doors. Of these, or of the impressions which they diffused, he was perfectly careless; and upon that point he should say, that if this bill succeeded, and eventually revived hostile feelings among the people of this country against the concessions which it involved, he for one should not appeal to that angry spirit, if it arose against the principle of the bill; if the people of England became roused by its success, he should deprecate on this as well as he had done upon any other occasion, an appeal to their excited passions upon the wisdom or the justice of the measure. Against

such appeals he should always set his face, believing, as he did, that the deliberative wisdom of parliament was better calculated to weigh maturely the important bearings of any great question, than the general opinions of parties elsewhere. If he thought the claims contended for were formed to promote the good of the state, the whole voice of England, out of doors, should not dissuade him from admitting the necessity of their adoption. It was because he thought the motion not calculated to promote any good purpose, that he was prepared to oppose it to the utmost of his means. His opinions and his duty here coincided, and upon them he meant consistently to act. Upon this occasion he had declined resorting to any influence to counteract the fair consideration of this question; he had been, it was true, consulted about the means of opposing it, and he now solemnly declared that his advice was expressed rather against than for petitioning to impede the bill. He told the parties by whom he had been consulted, that he cared not for their petitions; he valued them not; for, in his view, the house of commons were fully competent to decide upon the whole merits of the case, unaided by external assistance; he thought they required no illumination from without, to enable them to form a sound decision upon whatever question was submitted to their consideration. This being his opinion, he had given no encouragement to counter-petitions upon this great question. He could most conscientiously assure the house, that no result of this debate could give him unqualified satisfaction.

satisfaction. He was of course bound to wish that the opinions which he honestly felt might prevail; but their prevalence must still be mingled with regret at the disappointment which he knew the success of such opinions must entail upon a great portion of his fellow-subjects. If, however, on the contrary, the motion succeeded, there was no man who heard him would more cordially rejoice if his predictions proved unfounded, his arguments groundless, and that the result should exemplify the sanguine expectations of the right honourable mover, and give an increased confidence to all classes of his majesty's subjects, in that interesting country in which such union and harmony was most desirable.

Sir James Macintosh said, that if the right honourable gentleman who had just sat down, felt he had reason to allude to the disadvantages he laboured under, in having to follow so powerful a speech as that of the mover of this great question; if he (Mr. Peel) should have thought he had reason to complain at being called upon to rise immediately after the great display of the prodigious talents of his right honourable friend, who had often been admired for his commanding powers, never so greatly exercised as upon this night, when he showed himself to be the greatest master of eloquence and reasoning now existing in public life, how much more was he (Sir J. Macintosh) entitled to crave their indulgence, when his duty was to follow in expressing a coincidence of opinion with a man who had exhausted every part of his subject. He was not sure that under

such circumstances, and in this exhausted state of the side of the question which he meant to advocate, he should have intruded upon the attention of the house were it not for some of the concluding observations of the right honourable gentleman who had just spoken. Were it not for these observations, he should not perhaps have seized this his first opportunity of delivering his sentiments in behalf of the great cause of religion, of liberality, wise policy, national unanimity, and, indeed, national security. The right honourable gentleman had framed the greater part of his speech by assuming that certain propositions had been laid down by his right honourable friend, which he had never uttered, and by encountering other propositions which he had mistakenly attributed to him. His right honourable friend (Mr. Plunkett) had laid it down as a general principle, that by the law and constitution every Englishman was of common right entitled to admissibility, not to admission to the privileges of the state. He had, however, never contended for it as an unqualified principle, as one which was open to no exception or reservation. All his right honourable friend had contended for was this, that every Englishman had a common right not to be disabled from an admissibility to the attainment of the distinctions conferred by the state. And in laying down this broad principle, so far from putting it free from exception or qualification, his right honourable friend had justly and forcibly ridiculed the pedantry of those metaphysical politicians who had attempted

attempted to reduce the system of legislation to the fixedness of an abstract science. His right honourable friend's arguments deduced from his positions were principally expressive of his sense of the injustice of continuing these restrictions, and of the visionary danger which was apprehended from their removal. The right honourable gentleman opposite (Mr. Peel,) in reply to the powerful reasoning of his right honourable friend, urged the danger to be, according to his opinion, apprehended from adopting such a course, and enlarged upon what he called the successive dangers which at all times operated to prevent the adoption of such a measure, both before and since the accession of the house of Hanover. But the right honourable gentleman had forgotten that this series of successive dangers uniformly arose from the prevalence of one apprehension, which was against the domination of a catholic party at home, acting by the instigation of foreigners. So that the succession of dangers alluded to by the right honourable gentleman ought rather to be described as one continued than disjointed danger, which occasionally became more apparent from the influence of particular circumstances. The opinions of catholics were then used as a test, with reference to the foreign influence complained of. So it was at the time of the danger apprehended from Philip the second; so it was in the time of Louis the fourteenth; afterwards, during the reign of Mary queen of Scots, and downwards to the time of the Pretender. But the danger in all these cases was one and the

same, and alike imminent and urgent, and required from the lawyers who framed these disabilities the great exception which they felt themselves then authorized to make in the case of the catholics. But this exception, and indeed every deviation from the broad principle of equal admissibility, was, as his right honourable friend had said, enacted upon grounds professedly temporary, and with a limitation which the right honourable gentleman opposite had in the whole course of his argument studiously overlooked. The statesmen at the time of the revolution were providing against what appeared to them to be a great present danger; against that alone were they protecting themselves; and yet the right honourable gentleman, who appears anxious to follow their example, thinks he does so, by advocating a continuance of a part of these laws, not because he can see any present danger, but because he thinks there might possibly arise some remote danger to the existing establishments of the state. The statesmen of the revolution acted upon one undeviating principle of exclusion, arising out of a danger which they deemed to be palpable and immediate, while the right honourable gentleman was prepared to make permanent that which was originally meant solely for a specific and temporary purpose. With respect to the petition which had been presented from the English catholics, he called the attention of the house to the fact, that they tendered a declaration which went the whole substance of that required by the act of queen Elizabeth, an act in

the

the reign of that zealous queen deemed to be a sufficient test of the loyalty of Englishmen. The right honourable gentleman had laid great stress upon the danger which in his opinion must arise from the repeal of the statute of the 30th of Charles the second, and had loudly declared, that to repeal that law would be to alter the whole frame of the British constitution. When the right honourable gentleman attached so much constitutional importance to the act of Charles the second, it was right to refer back to its origin, and to the circumstances which called it forth. Now, with reference to the history of that act, he (sir James Macintosh) would say, that no law which had ever been promulgated sprung from a more infamous origin; no law ever flowed from so foul and impure a source; never had a law been passed under circumstances of so detestable and infamous a nature, as those which attended the enactment of that statute which the right honourable gentleman seemed to revere, as if it were the great charter of the constitution. He had taken pains to refer to the journals for the history of this statute. It had been introduced on the 28th of October, 1678, and it was curious to see how the house had been occupied just before it adopted that act-to see in what manner it had prepared itself for grave deliberation-with what equanimity and temper it commenced the work of legislating for the exclusion of a great portion of the subjects of this kingdom. Would the house believe that, during the whole of the day preceding the enactment of this bill, the house had been busily

occupied in the examination of Titus Oates? It was after this preparation that the bill so praised had passed: when the minds of members were intoxicated with the flagitious perjury of that detestable and atrocious miscreant, whose shocking crimes had not only brought disgrace upon the country which he had duped, but also sacrificed the lives of so many innocent and deserving characters.

In that manner had the bill been passed, and it furnished a melancholy instance of the facility with which the legislature was brought to enact severe laws, and the difficulty always manifested to have them revoked, even when their injustice was apparent. Here was an instance in which one abandoned and remorseless miscreant, an outcast from the human race, was able to inflame that house-to delude it at a moment when it contained the greatest patriots and the wisest men, some of whom shed their blood, and others lived for the deliverance of their country at the revolution. Yet this single foul and wretched perjurer was able to hurry through a measure of exclusion against millions of his fellow subjects, which it took twenty years of all the genius and patriotism of England to struggle against in the hope of undoing. Thus twenty years of the labours of such men were unable to undo the falsehoods which it only took this wretch a single morning to utter. Who then could say that such an act ought to be considered as entitled to the weight which ought only to belong to measures deep and well digested for the public welfare? It was not a little singular that the right bon

ourable

ourable gentleman should have arrayed the authority of king William upon this occasion in support of his argument. No monarch had ever been more calumniated by an ungrateful posterity than that sovereign. It was true that a paper had been confided, by the prince of Orange, to the private agent of James the second. It was no less true that James was anxious for the repeal of the test law, as he wished to have had as many catholic officers as possible in the ranks of his army, to assist in the accomplishment of his ulterior designs. James had two laws before him, one of which he thought he might have repealed. Had he, instead of attempting the repeal of the test law, tried that of the habeas corpus act, there was every chance of his succeeding, for the people had not then had long experience of those frequent suspensions of that act

leration, and protected them from the then existing severity of the law. The right honourable gentleman had referred to the debate upon the occasional conformity question, but he was not justified in deducing from it any thing besides this, that these laws were then the subject of constant evasion, just as they had been since George the first's indemnity act. The right honourable gentleman had praised in becoming terms the character of lord Somers, and he hoped that any thing which might fall from him (sir James Macintosh) would not weaken the authority of that great man at the opposite side of the house. But the right honourable gentleman had strangely mistaken the acts of those times, when he inferred that, because their ancestors had wisely guarded against an existing danger, they meant to enact for future ages a perpetual exclusion bill. The right honourable gentleman was most unfortunate when he quoted the case of the quakers, as being analogous to that of the Roman catholics; they were, he said, admitted upon their own test in civil cases, but rejected upon it in criminal. This was, however, a singular, and he must be permitted to say, rather an absurd analogical argument to justify the exclusion of the catholics. The right honourable gentleman wished to impress upon the house that the one exclusion was not greater than the other. But did he recollect that the disabilities attaching to quakers in criminal cases, to which he alluded, could not so much be said to affect themselves as the parties who required their evidence? As the right honourable gentleman

which now render it so valuable to Englishmen. King James preferred, however, to repeal the test law, and he failed in his attempt. King William formally declared that he would resist the repeal of the disabling laws, although he was ready to concur in a remis. sion of some of the penal. And he added this very remarkable expression, that if the remission of the penal acts were found to succeed, their king might subsequently consider of the repeal of the disabling laws. Bishop Burnett, indeed, who must have had excellent opportunities of knowing the fact, stated that king William was a greater favourite of the catholics than any other English monarch who ever sat upon the throne; he secured for them to

had