your laws, and beard your Government. You have rendered them infinitely more powerful than they ever were, and this power is employed to produce the most calamitous effects in your Cabinet, in your Legislature, and through the whole range of your interests. If their power increase as it has done, it is matter of moral certainty, that they will speedily reduce your Constitution to ruins, or involve you in civil war for its preservation.

If all this do not prove that you must wholly change your system of governing the Catholics, and that it must henceforward be to annihilate Catholicism to the utmost point possible, proof has vanished from this world of guilt and error. Under your inaction the evils will not remain stationary; your exertions are called for, not only for aggression, but for defence ;-you must destroy the enemy, or the enemy will destroy you.

What are you really called on to do in regard to principle and measure? The Catholics consist almost wholly of the ignorant lower orders, and they are wholly led by priests and profligate demagogues. They would be tranquil and obedient; they would treat the disabilities with disregard, were it not for these leaders. The latter have told you this; they have declared to you, that their atrocious efforts have made the body what it is, and that such efforts alone can preserve it as what it is. They have confessed before the world, what the world knows to be true, that the Catholics are not a people acting from settled principle, and a strong steady belief of wrongs, but an uninformed populace acting from passion and delusion, produced by the vilest practices of unprincipled men.

With this before you, as matter of demonstration and confession,-with the natural and necessary knowledge of the remedies forced upon you by the Catholics themselves,-what has been your conduct? You have not only tolerated but justified the demagogues and priests in every device of tumult and treason they could conceive; and you have even encouraged the people to become their victims. You have suffered the former to give unlimited scope to their will in trampling on law and authority, scattering abroad every stimulant to madness and

convulsion, and establishing every institution calculated to generate flame and rebellion; and the latter would have been more than men, or less, if they had not been rendered what they are. The same causes, without the aid of religious divisions, would have produced the same effects in any country. Had the lower orders in England been so worked on, they would long since have trod your imbecile rulers in the dust. The Catholics have, as they proclaim to you, gained their power through your criminal incapacity; and it now exists in your criminal cowardice.

What then ought you now to resolve on? If you bind your rulers by statute to their imbecility, and give to the Catholic leaders both a large increase of power and of legal means for doing what they have done, will this be a remedy? Because the constitution and laws have been thus far destroyed, will the farther destruction of them be a remedy? Because the Catholics. have been made what they are, will the sacrifice to them of the Protestants of England, Scotland, and Ireland, be a remedy? We ask for your own sake, and not ours. If you had to speak in respect of England, instead of Ireland, your reply would be-Restrain the demagogues and priests from violating the laws, and injuring the public weal! Such would be your reply, and you would at once reduce it to practice. And why cannot you so speak in respect of Ireland? Why is it that every thing Irish has such a fatal effect on your understanding. Until you as certain that in Ireland truth is falsehood, sanity is madness, wisdom is folly, and guilt is innocence, treat it as you do the rest of the United Kingdom. Legislate for Ireland as you would for England-remedy Irish evils as you would English ones-coerce Catholic crime as you would Protestant crime !-This must be your conduct if you are not bent on your own ruin.

If laws and measures are necessary in Ireland, does it follow that you are not to resort to them because they are not necessary in England? If a gigantic evil, which threatens every thing dear to the empire, exist in Ireland, is it to be tolerated, because it is not to be found in England? The injuries which afflict, and the dangers which surround you, must extort from you a negative;

SIR,

I OFFER no apology for calling your notice to the letter lately written by his Grace the Duke of Newcastle to Lord Kenyon. The principles of your publication, and the forcible and consistent manner in which you have sustained them, are sufficient proof to me that you will feel like every friend of the Constitution on the subject, and be rejoiced at the appearance of a document doing so much honour to the noble writer, and to the class of society to which he belongs.

The truth is, sir, that whatever might have been the value of vigour and integrity among our men of rank, they are now more essential than ever. The British nation can never be without powerful and accomplished minds; but we want to see combined with that intelligence, the candour, fearlessness, and dignity of head and heart, with out which mental power degenerates into trick and subtlety, and the more accomplished a senator is, the more he becomes hazardous to his country.

But there are circumstances connected with this Letter, that give it a peculiar value. If the Duke of Newcastle had been one of those pushing and presumptuous individuals that perpetually disgust the public, an obtrusive orator, a man in the habit of forcing his claims and his connexions on the public, and encumbering our governorships and embassies with spendthrift puppyism and impudent incapacity, in the shape of his depend ents; or if he had been one of those fragments and survivors of shipwreck ed faction that we see, with hourly scorn, struggling to make their way to shore on the turn of the tide, and glad to scramble into beggarly possession; I should not have cared more for his letter than for the paper on which it was written. But the writer is alto gether the reverse. A man who evidently dislikes the tumult and teasing of political life; who has not spoken half-a-dozen times in the House; who, notwithstanding the most evident and sensitive feeling on the greater public questions, and, as he has sufficiently shewn, with the ability to make his opinion of importance, has in general turned away from the task, and rather

incurred the self-reproach which he acknowledges to have felt, than broken through his natural reluctance to mingle in public discussion.

In this Letter we have the sentiments of a mind that nothing trivial could have tempted to come forward. Whatever is spoken, is spoken from a solemn sense of its imperious necessity; its principles are dictated from the heart of a man, whose strong sincerity and absolute conviction of the truth have conquered his habitual aversion for public appeal; like the son of Croesus, his tongue has been untied, and he has cried aloud only in the strong alarm and affection for his endangered King and Country. There is another value in this Letter. It is the language of a part of the nation, who have hitherto not spoken. That immense and unobtrusive, but immeasurably powerful majority, by whom all the great questions of England must finally be decided; that vast and solid mass of the mind, the property and the religion of England, which is emphatically the nation; which, engaged in its own concerns, and relying upon the strength of the Constitution, looks with a careless eye, or with utter contempt, on the petty tricks and changes of the common ri vals for office, and the equally unimportant pranks of popular opinion. Such barks and barges may cut their courses, and follow or sink each other just as they like, without leaving a wrinkle on the wave. The mighty expanse round and below them, will not be shaken from its depths by such disturbers. It requires a higher impulse; but when the tempest comes to summon it, woe be to the wretches that think to sport upon its surface still.

When the British nation shall once raise its voice, the whole petty clamour and quackery of the political charlatans will be extinguished in the roar. But it is tardy as it is powerful, and generations have passed down to the grave since the occasion for its summons has been given; and without that occasion it will never abandon its natural and wise reluctance. But the time seems to be at hand, and the writer of this letter, in his reluctance,