1-6 The Catholics of Ireland. [JAN, 



ning this in Ireland, nothing can be done without concession to the 

 Catholics : and England runs no risk in making such concession. 



In Ireland, unity can never be attained without some measure approach- 

 ing to Emancipation ; unless it were by the other decisive measure of 

 Extermination which the spirit of the times will not permit us to apply. 

 Six millions of persons or five or four will never be persuaded 

 though they might be fried into a quiet resignation of their civil rights. 

 This very fact, that we must not be " executive," it is that makes our 

 attempting to be " unjust," so peculiarly absurd. If we mTght hang or 

 drown the whole five millions of Irish Catholic population ; or what 

 would be better bane all the men with Prussic acid, keeping alive the 

 female children, and the grown women under forty ; then, whatever 

 might be thought of the humanity of our project, there would be some 

 show of common sense and reason in it. But, what folly " more gross 

 than ever ignorance made drunk " would be that of any military com- 

 mander, who should voluntarily march into the field of battle, at the 

 head of an army of twenty thousand men knowing one brigade, of seven 

 thousand among them, to be disaffected to himself, and to the cause they 

 had to fight for ? 



Then, for the risk which England would encounter, in granting to the 

 Catholics those concessions which we have described except some little 

 ebullition of triumph (which would be offensive, perhaps, to the eyes 

 and ears of Irish Protestants) in the outset a little vulgar insolence 

 from falling demagogues, which men of sense would smile at and a few 

 bonfires (not of houses) among the peasantry, which a posse of extra 

 constables would put down what more should we have to fear from the 

 people of Ireland (emancipated) than we have to fear at present ? The 

 same means the same physical force would keep the country then 

 that keeps it now. We should still have the bayonets of the military to 

 repress violence ; the sentence of the jcdge, and the hand of the hang- 

 man, to punish offence. We do not shrink from the mention of these 

 remedies ; let them be used so they be used justly ; let them be used 

 firmly and freely : we are better content that fifty men should die for wil- 

 fully violating the law, than that five hundred thousand should be kept in 

 bondage or surveillance from an apprehension that they may violate it. 

 If we have strength to keep Ireland down now with every Catholic in 

 it necessarily disaffected to our system why not, at least, have equal 

 power to keep it, when all the moderate party of the Catholics to put 

 our hopes upon the most modest footing would have cause to be 

 content ? 



For, eligibility to trust and office, it must be recollected, does not give 

 men election to trust and office ; and we should no more make a Catholic 

 lawyer Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas than we do a Protes- 

 tant, without first being well assured that he was a fit man for such a 

 situation. The Catholics, after they were eligible to elevation, would 

 still have to earn their elevation, like other people, by their talents, or by 

 meritorious service ; impertinence and dullness after it had obtained 

 all the eligibility in the world would remain practically just in the same 

 place where it is at present. And, for any apprehension of the increase 

 of the progress of Catholicism in these days, when reason and educa- 

 tion are rapidly advancing in every quarter of the globe ! when Catho- 

 licism in Spain and Portugal even out of the operations of the late 



