MEMOIR OF THOMAS BEWICK. 311 



would soon feel themselves, under our excellent 

 constitution, as happy and loyal a people as any 

 in the world, and as much attached to their 

 country, which, for its healthy climate and fertile 

 soil, may match with any other on this globe. 

 One would hope that the native gentry would at 

 length see the very reprehensible injustice of be- 

 coming absentees. Landowners in all countries, 

 as well as in Ireland, ought as far as possible to 

 spend their rents where they receive them. Where 

 they do not do so, any country is certain to become 

 poor.* The people of Ireland ought instantly to be 

 put upon a par, in every respect, with their fellow 

 subjects of the British Isles. To withhold Catholic 

 emancipation from Ireland appears to me to be 

 invidious and unjust ; and, if emancipated, it 

 would be found at no very distant period that they 

 would, under the foregoing tuition, individually 

 become enlightened, think for themselves, adopt 

 a rational religious belief, and throw off the 

 bigotry and superstition taught them with such 

 sedulous care from their infancy, and by which 

 they have so long been led blindfold. If they 

 could be brought to think, and to muster up so 

 much of the reasoning power as to do all this, 

 they would soon emancipate themselves. But 

 even on this business it must be observed that the 

 Protestant Establishment does not interfere with 

 the Catholic modes of faith; they may preach up 



* In my ardent wish for the perfect happiness and union of the 

 sister Isles, I have suffered my sanguine imagination to wish and 

 hope that some great convulsion of nature might some day happen 

 to throw up the bed of the sea between them, so as to unite them 

 both in one ; and present a south-western rocky front to the ocean. 

 I see no harm in indulging in such reveries ! they may, indeed, be 

 visionary, but they are innocent ones. 



