THE LORDS, THE COMMONS, AND THE PEOPLE. 295 



tilations they committed on the corresponding measure of last year for 

 England and Wales. Need they then to be told that if that was an 

 experiment on public feeling and public endurance which exposed them 

 to no small measure of danger, it were unwise, in the highest degree, 

 not only to repeat it in the case of Ireland, but to repeat it under cir- 

 cumstances of great additional aggravation ? 



If our voice could reach the ears of their Lordships, we would labour 

 to impress on their minds, first of all, that the necessity of a re- 

 form in the Municipal Corporations of the sister island is infinitely 

 more urgent than it ever was in that of England. The circumstances 

 of the two countries are as different as if they were not only under the 

 sway of different monarchs, but as if their geographical positions were 

 wide as the poles asunder. In England there has been, for generations 

 past, the most ample toleration, in reality as well as in name, in re- 

 ligious matters. Men of every persuasion were equally eligible, before 

 the Municipal Reform Bill of last year passed, in so far as their rehgious 

 tenets were concerned, to every corporate or civic office. In Ireland it 

 was, or rather is, far otherwise. There one denomination has always 

 lorded it over another, and this, too, with a very high hand. The 

 Roman Catholics have been pre-eminently, notwithstanding the boasted 

 freedom of British institutions, a proscribed and persecuted sect in the 

 sister island ; they have, for centuries, been sufferers for conscience' 

 sake, which circumstance, by the way, as has been found in every 

 other case of persecution, has, we are satisfied, been the principal cause 

 of preserving their numbers. And if the native odiousness and un- 

 seemline ss, in a free country, of lavishing all the honours of the State 

 on one denomination, to the exclusion of others, and heaping all man- 

 ner of gratuitous indignities on the proscribed, could by possibility be 

 aggravated, that aggravation would be found in the fact, that the in- 

 tolerant party were but a mere handful, in point of numbers, compared 

 with the party whose rights are trampled on and whose feelings are 

 outraged. Hitherto the Roman Catholics of Ireland have had nothing 

 more to do with the municipal affairs of their country than if they had 

 had, individually, like the first criminal of whom we read, some mark 

 of frightful delinquencies impressed on their foreheads. It would have 

 been well, comparatively, had their persecutions been only of a passive 

 character. Had it consisted in their exclusion from corjjorate and other 

 offices, and from corporate and other honours, the fact would have 



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