Your
alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their
grievances, or an unlawful one. If you do not admit them to the House
of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoe Place, Dublin,
and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be in
Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see
twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all
the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should
have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on
their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject
it."
A noble lord--his name unluckily has perished--had attempted to salve his
own conscience and that of his colleagues in hostility to the Roman claims,
by affirming that exclusion from civil office was not persecution; and
Peter handles him with delighted vigour, in a passage which, more than
eighty years later, was quoted with enthusiasm by Mr. Gladstone.[45]--
"A distinction, I perceive, is taken by one of the most feeble
noblemen in Great Britain, between persecution and the deprivation of
political power; whereas there is no more distinction between these
two things than there is between him who makes the distinction and a
booby. If I strip off the relic-covered jacket of a Catholic and give
him twenty stripes, I persecute.
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