to those limits in which the legislature intended they should be
placed: it is not only that I am excluded from certain offices and
dignities because I am a Catholic, but the exclusion carries with it
a certain stigma, which degrades me in the eyes of the monopolising
sect, and the very name of my religion becomes odious. These
effects are so very striking in England, that I solemnly believe
blue and red baboons to be more popular here than Catholics and
Presbyterians; they are more understood, and there is a greater
disposition to do something for them. When a country squire hears
of an ape, his first feeling is to give it nuts and apples; when he
hears of a Dissenter, his immediate impulse is to commit it to the
county gaol, to shave its head, to alter its customary food, and to
have it privately whipped. This is no caricature, but an accurate
picture of national feelings, as they degrade and endanger us at
this very moment. The Irish Catholic gentleman would bear his legal
disabilities with greater temper, if these were all he had to bear--
if they did not enable every Protestant cheese-monger and tide-
waiter to treat him with contempt. He is branded on the forehead
with a red-hot iron, and treated like a spiritual felon, because in
the highest of all considerations he is led by the noblest of all
guides, his own disinterested conscience.

Why are nonsense and cruelty a bit the better because they are
enacted? If Providence, which gives wine and oil, had blessed us
with that tolerant spirit which makes the countenance more pleasant
and the heart more glad than these can do; if our Statute Book had
never been defiled with such infamous laws, the sepulchral Spencer
Perceval would have been hauled through the dirtiest horse-pond in
Hampstead, had he ventured to propose them. But now persecution is
good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and