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Peter Plymley's Letters, and selected essays by Sydney Smith
page 18 of 166 (10%)
in the other, if the Catholic emancipation were carried into effect.
Do you mean that these thirty members would bring in a bill to take
away the tithes from the Protestant, and to pay them to the Catholic
clergy? Do you mean that a Catholic general would march his army
into the House of Commons, and purge it of Mr. Perceval and Dr.
Duigenan? or, that the theological writers would become all of a
sudden more acute or more learned, if the present civil incapacities
were removed? Do you fear for your tithes, or your doctrines, or
your person, or the English Constitution? Every fear, taken
separately, is so glaringly absurd, that no man has the folly or the
boldness to state it. Every one conceals his ignorance, or his
baseness, in a stupid general panic, which, when called on, he is
utterly incapable of explaining. Whatever you think of the
Catholics, there they are--you cannot get rid of them; your
alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their
grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the
House of Commons, they will hold their parliament in Potatoe Place,
Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would
be in Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security
as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked
upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their
party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that
such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness
and ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics? Can you
neglect them? They are too numerous for both these expedients.
What remains to be done is obvious to every human being--but to that
man who, instead of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of
us and our children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good
old Priam and his sons, become a legislator and a politician.

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