of the Catholic church.

Mr. Goulburn and Mr. Peel again insisted upon danger to the Constitution, the Church, and the State, but without proving, any more than their predecessors had done, that whatever danger there might be would be in any wise increased by Catholic emancipation. Mr. Peel illus trated his general argument by a particular example; he put the case of a Catholic king, who, by the bill before the house, would have it in his power to appoint a Catholic ministry. The contingency is somewhat distant, as well as somewhat improbable: but suppose it certain and near at hand; unless a majority in Parliament were Catholics too, what harm could be done by a Catholic king, though backed by a Catholic ministry? If such chimerical terrors are to be listened to, what dangers are we not exposed to al

Dr. Doyle certainly did say so. He also said (what Mr. Brownlow did not mention) that these doctrines never had been doctrines of that church; by which latter assertion he took away the whole value of the former. If, according to Dr. Doyle, the temporal authority of the Pope is as much a doctrine of the Catholic church as it was when a Gregory or a Boniface fulminated their excommunications and sentences of deposition against kings and emperors; if the power of dispensation is as much a doctrine of the church as it was when indulgences were openly sold from one end of Europe to the other; of what consequence is it that, in the opinion of one man, or of two men (Dr. Doyle and Dr. Murray), these powers were not authorized? Their not being authorized did not prevent their being acted upon then, nor could it pre-ready! What is there to hinder the King vent them, if an opportunity offered, from being acted upon now. If individual opinions were wanted, we had opinions already; opinions of foreign universities, at least as high authority as Dr. Doyle. As for the Pope, we can hardly conceive any thing more ridiculous than to talk of danger from him. The real danger is from the power of the priests, whether concentrated in one man, or diffused through a great number. If they place the supreme direction in his hands, it is for their own purposes: and if they do not, it is for the same reason. His power is only their power and does Mr. Brownlow really think that either priests or any other sort of men ever give up any power which they can possibly keep; or are withheld from resuming it by any other reason than because they cannot?

We shall pass slightly over the remainder of the debate. Mr. Dawson brought forward several arguments against emancipation, the chief of which were, that Mr. O'Connell and Dr. Doyle were temperate before the committee but turbulent in Ireland: that the Catholics, in 1824, petitioned parliament for a reform in the temporalities of the Irish church, and that a Catholic parliament treated the Protestants in 1687 pretty much as Protestant parliaments have treated the Catholics ever since. Sufficient answers having been given to these objections, either by the speakers who followed, or in the former part of this article, we shall not waste our readers' time and our own by going over them again.

from turning Presbyterian, and filling every office in the ministry with Presbyterians? yet is this very likely to happen? or where would be the harm if it did? Has the King, with or without a ministry of his choice, the power to change the established religion, against the will of his people? If so, he can as well change the constitution itself; whatever advantages we owe to it, exist only by his sufferance, and the government of this country is in reality despotic. But if not, what becomes of the imaginary danger?

As a

We must now need say something (much we need not) on the celebrated speech of the Duke of York. What there was objectionable in it has been sufficiently exposed by others; and the station of the royal speaker has drawn down animadversions more severe than the speech, if delivered from other lips, would probably have called forth. piece of argument, it cannot be spoken of seriously; indeed, it scarcely laid claim to that character. With the exception of what Mr. Canning called "the idle ob"jection of the coronation oath," it only offered one reason, which turned upon the oddest of all equivoques. No clergyman can sit in the House of Commons; therefore (said his Royal Highness), the Protestant church, meaning the clergy, is not represented; ergo, the Catholic church, meaning the laity, ought not to be represented either. Considered merely

Ante, p. 261. See also, ante, p. 9: Fallacy of Vows.

as a declaration of opinion, we have not much to say against this speech: his Royal Highness was as well entitled, as any other person, to choose his side. It may be questioned, however, whether it would have been in any way discreditable to his Royal Highness, if, in testifying his attachment to the opinion he had chosen, he had remembered that even the Heir to the Throne is not infallible, and that it was just possible, that the opinion, to which he was thus solemnly vowing an eternal adherence, might be wrong.

In the interval between the second and third reading of the Catholic bill, two auxiliary measures were introduced into the lower house, which have excited much discussion, and occasioned much difference of opinion, both among the supporters and among the opponents of the Catholic claims.

The question of a state provision for the Catholic clergy does not seem to us encumbered with many difficulties. Such a provision certainly is not per se desirable. To a Protestant, it must of course appear desirable that there should be none but Protestants, in which case there would be no Catholic clergy, and consequently no need of paying them.There are, however, Catholic clergy, and they exercise great influence over the people. We should be very glad to see that influence weakened: but, in the meantime, the question is, whether every thing which can be done ought not to be done, towards rendering it as little noxious as possible.

rals*. We make no invidious insinua tions; we will not ask, whether the priests have given direct encouragement to those early marriages, which have co-operated with bad government to make the Irish people what they aret; but we say that nothing can be more impolitic, nor can shew a greater ignorance of human nature, than to admit of the continuance of a state of things in which it is their interest to do so.

Whenever, therefore, a public provision shall be granted to the Catholic clergy of Ireland, we hope that the act conferring it will contain a clause, providing, not for the discontinuance of the fees on marriages and baptisms, but for their being regularly handed over to some officer, for the benefit of the public revenue. To reconcile the priests themselves to this transfer, we would suggest that a portion of their stipends should be in name as well as in reality a commutation for their fees. Under this arrangement they would no longer have an interest in encouraging im provident marriages, while the money received on account of fees would in part contribute to defray the expense of the stipends.

Another reason for paying the Catholic clergy, is to diminish the interest they now have in proselytism. Believing, as

* Mr. Dennis Browne says in his Evidence before the Commons' Committee, that the priests have not, at an average, in his part of the country, 1001. a-year, and that they get for a marriage sometimes half-a-guinea, sometimes 15s., never less than half-a-guinea; independently of the collections made at the wedding among the visitors, which, according to Dr. Doyle, have been known to amount to 401. The Rev. Malachi Duggan, parish priest of Moyferta and Killballyowen, who stated his annual income to be about 2001., deex-clared himself to have celebrated in the preceding year about fifty marriages; whereof about thirty produced pounds or guineas each; thirteen produced various sums from 21. 10s. to 61.; four produced various sums from 58. to 10s. ; and three, to the best of his recollection, were gratuitous. Out of an income, therefore, of 2001., nearly 901. were derived from the fees on marriages alone. [Rev. M. Duggan's Evidence before the Commons' Committee of 1824.]

By the admission of all who know any thing of Ireland, one of the greatest evils of that country is, a deficiency of employ ment compared with the numbers of the people, or, what is the same thing, an cess of numbers, compared with the means of employment. As the best established general principles forbid us to expect that any measures, having for their object to provide employment for the people, can afford any thing more than a temporary palliation to the evil, whilst their numbers continue to increase at the piesent rate-there is nothing to be done without correcting the prevailing habit of early marriages and heedless increase of families. But to the introduction of any change in this respect, no state of things can be more adverse than one in which the priests derive their chief emoluments from marriages, baptisms, and

+ See, however, the evidence of Mr. Frankland Lewis, before the Lords' Committee of 1825, who says [p. 41], "I believe it is known that the priests avow that they do recommend early marriages;" and the evidence of Mr. Leslie Foster [p. 66], "I believe it is a matter pretty well ascertained, that the Roman Catholic clergy are in the habit of suggesting marriages to young persons, and not merely recommending, but enjoining them." See also the evidence of Mr. Justice fune-Day [ibid. p. 554] to the same effect.

est consequence whom they vote for; at | least, it is not necessary that they should exercise any choice; or rather, it would be of the most fatal consequence if they did. Elections, according to them, are on the best footing, when there are but two or three real choosers; the two or three thousand, who are the nominal choosers, discharging no other functions, in regard to the favoured candidate, than that of committing to memory his name, and repeating it at the hustings, to a person stationed there to hear it.

This class of politicians find in Ireland a system of election management to their heart's content. Droves of electors, driven to the poll often without knowing, till they reach the spot, the name of the candidate whom they are to vote for; themselves the property of their landlord, a sort of live stock upon the estate, whom nobody thinks of canvassing, and who would probably stare on being told that the franchise (as it is ironically called) was regarded as a privilege to themselves. In one or two instances of late years, when the state of misery to which they were already reduced rendered ejectment from their wretched tenancies an event scarcely to be dreaded, they did, in considerable numbers, break through their subjection, and from being the tools of their landlords, became the tools of their priests: in consequence of which defection they had to endure all the sufferings which the rage of their thwarted taskmasters could inflict upon them*.

It is true, as was justly observed by Col. Johnson, than the proper remedy for these evils is not disfranchisement, but vote by ballot. Vote by ballot, however, there was no chance of obtaining. Disfranchisement there was a chance of obtaining: it could do no harm, and might do good; by taking away from a few lords of the soil the power of bringing their thousands and tens of thousands to the poll, it would tend to give at least somewhat more importance to the small number of electors who can choose for themselves, without drawing down upon their heads inevitable ruin. It is no mark of wisdom to reject what is good, because you cannot have what is better.

On the other hand, we agree with Lord Milton, that the good effects of this measure have been much exaggerated. It has been assumed, as it appears to us on scarcely any evidence, that the desire of making freeholds for electioneering purposes, has been a great cause of the minute subdivision of lands. That it may have been so in one or two instances we do not deny; indeed it is sufficiently proved that it has. But, that, as a general rule, such political influence as the landlords of the predominant party might acquire by splitting farms, over and above what they might have had without it, could act upon them with sufficient force to counterbalance the direct and obvious interest which they have in the good cultivation of their estates, is a conclusion not to be founded on one or two, or even on ten or twenty, instances. That the lands should be parpre-celled out in small farms, was no more than is natural in a country where, till of late, scarcely any tenants had capital enough to occupy large ones. Now, when capital is flowing into the country, the landlords are rapidly clearing their estates of the wretched cottier tenantry; uniting numbers of small farms into one, and introducing a better system of cultivation. Observe that the church lands, on

It is moreover well established, though in the lamentable ignorance which vails in this country with respect to Ireland, it seems not to be generally known, that, of those who are called, and give their votes as, forty-shilling freeholders, it is a very small proportion indeed who are really so; the remainder consisting of persons who not only have not an interest to the value of forty shillings in the land, but who pay to their landlords a full, and more than a full rent; and are registered as freeholders by the grossest perjury on their own part, and the grossest subornation or rather compulsion of perjury on that of the Irish gentlemen, their landlordst.

See particularly the evidence of Mr. Leslie Foster before the Lords' Committee of 1825, (p. 79). “There have fallen, within my own knowedge, frequent instances of the tenants having been destroyed in consequence of their having oted with their clergy."

† Sce the evidence of Mr. Blake, (p. 43); of

Dr. Kelly, (p. 252); of Col. Currey, (pp. 303-4); of the Rev. Henry Cooke, (p. 372); of the Rev. Thomas Costello, (p. 416); of Mr. Rochfort, (pp. 435-6); of Mr. Barrington, (pp. 577-8); and of Dr. O'Brien, (p. 588), before the Commons' Committee of 1825; the evidence of Mr. Justice Day (p. 263), before the Commons' Committee of 1824; of Mr. Leslie Foster, (p. 78); Mr. Blake, (p. 106); the Bishop of Derry (p. 290 ); Mr. Kelly, (p. 492); Mr. Justice Day, (p. 534); and Mr. Dominick Browne (pp. 586-7), before the Lords' Committee of 1825, &c.

Ante, p. 214.