of Catholics are better than four millions of wild beasts; two
hundred priests educated by our own government are better than the
same number educated by the man who means to destroy us.

The whole sum now appropriated by Government to the religious
education of four millions of Christians is 13,000 pounds; a sum
about one hundred times as large being appropriated in the same
country to about one-eighth part of this number of Protestants.
When it was proposed to raise this grant from 8,000 pounds to 13,000
pounds, its present amount, this sum was objected to by that most
indulgent of Christians, Mr. Spencer Perceval, as enormous; he
himself having secured for his own eating and drinking, and the
eating and drinking of the Master and Miss Percevals, the
reversionary sum of 21,000 pounds a year of the public money, and
having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt to secure to
himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster: and the
best of it is, that this minister, after abusing his predecessors
for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found himself
compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant the
sum in question, thus dissolving his pearl in vinegar, and
destroying all the value of the gift by the virulence and reluctance
with which it was granted.

I hear from some persons in Parliament, and from others in the
sixpenny societies for debate, a great deal about unalterable laws
passed at the Revolution. When I hear any man talk of an
unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince
me that he is an unalterable fool. A law passed when there was
Germany, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, and Turkey; when
there was a disputed succession; when four or five hundred acres