the greater part of the 100 Irish members who are returned to
parliament will be Catholics. Add to these the Catholic members who
are returned in England, and you will have a phalanx of heretical
strength which every minister will be compelled to respect, and
occasionally to conciliate by concessions incompatible with the
interests of the Protestant Church. The fact is, however, that you
are at this moment subjected to every danger of this kind which you
can possibly apprehend hereafter. If the spiritual interests of the
voters are more powerful than their temporal interests, they can
bind down their representatives to support any measures favourable
to the Catholic religion, and they can change the objects of their
choice till they have found Protestant members (as they easily may
do) perfectly obedient to their wishes. If the superior possessions
of the Protestants prevent the Catholics from uniting for a common
political object, then the danger you fear cannot exist: if zeal,
on the contrary, gets the better of acres, then the danger at
present exists, from the right of voting already given to the
Catholics, and it will not be increased by allowing them to sit in
parliament. There are, as nearly as I can recollect, thirty seats
in Ireland for cities and counties, where the Protestants are the
most numerous, and where the members returned must of course be
Protestants. In the other seventy representations the wealth of the
Protestants is opposed to the number of the Catholics; and if all
the seventy members returned were of the Catholic persuasion, they
must still plot the destruction of our religion in the midst of 588
Protestants. Such terrors would disgrace a cook-maid, or a
toothless aunt--when they fall from the lips of bearded and
senatorial men, they are nauseous, antiperistaltic, and emetical.

How can you for a moment doubt of the rapid effects which would be