484 The Political Slate of [Nov. 



and in all the commercial and territorial pressures of a war wliich 

 extended through the world, and required the expenditure of her 

 strength from the poles to the equator, England grew in territory and 

 in opulence. In the very uproar of war she was foremost in the arts of 

 peace. She bore a cliarmed life ; in the generid conflict which covered 

 the earth with the havoc and spoils of the mightiest nations, she moved 

 in the front of the encounter without a wound ; during twenty-five 

 years of the fiercest war that the world had ever seen, when the fall of 

 thrones had become a casualty that scarcely excited a passing wonder, 

 England, protected by the hand that turns away the arrow and extin- 

 guishes the pestilence, never suffered a single memorable reverse in 

 arms. 



It is not to be forgotten that this extraordinary succession of triumphs 

 was sustained by but few of the ordinai-y means of national supremacy. 

 The British cabinet was at no time more destitute of men of commanding 

 ability. There was no Chatham, with his powerful sagacity, liis elo- 

 quence, and his promptitude ; no Pitt, with his practised wisdom and 

 lofty possession of the national homage. The age of great statesmen had 

 passed away. And with our deepest respect for the abilities of the men 

 who followed them, it would be idle to enroll the names of Percival, 

 Castlereagh, and Liverpool, in the record with the Burkes and Pitts of 

 England. But they possessed an ability without which the loftiest 

 genius might have been worse than useless. They honoured the Pro- 

 testant principles of the British Constitution. Avoiding all offence to the 

 consciences of men, and using the language and spirit of the truest tole- 

 ration, they would have looked with the sternest hostility on any attempt 

 to pollute the legislature by the influence of popery. Their decision on 

 this point is unquestionable. The alleged declarations of Mr. Pitt and 

 Lord Castlereagh on the Catholic bill, never amounted to more than the 

 possibiUty of admitting the Catholics to a share in the government, when 

 they should have dissolved their unconstitutional connexion with a foreign 

 priest and sovereign, and given satisfactory pledges of their acknow- 

 ledgment of Protestantism as the religion of the people, and the principle 

 of the state. Those conditions were essential to the public safety ; but 

 they were notoriously incompatible with the superstitions of Rome, with 

 the hatred of Popery to the great Protestant government of England, 

 and with the determination born in every Popish heart, and strengthened 

 by every practice of his guilty church to look upon Protestantism as a 

 heresy, the Protestant as a traitor to Rome, the Protestant church as a 

 prey and a victim, and the weapons of the rack and the flame, the 

 hideous instruments of blood and fire, as the legitimate means of bringing 

 back the Protestant population throughout the world to their old pros- 

 tration of sold and bodj^ before Rome. 



The condition was equivalent to a denial of the possibility. Those 

 noble persons might as well have asked the Papist to abjure the worship 

 of stocks and stones, to declare the doctrine of absolution for murder 

 and treason at a set price an insult to common sense and public safety, or 

 the denial of the Scriptures to the people a criminal contempt of the 

 direct command of Heaven that the Scriptures should be the property of 

 all mankind. Pledges to the security of Protestantism were incom- 

 patible with the whole system of Popery. The mere demand of pledges 

 was but another form of complete refusal. And this, the example of 

 their successors has shown beyond all misconception. The "Atrocious 

 Bill" scoffs at securities. 



