If I say, 'Everybody in the town
where you live shall be a candidate for lucrative and honourable
offices but you, who are a Catholic,' I do not persecute! What
barbarous nonsense is this! As if degradation was not as great an evil
as bodily pain, or as severe poverty; as if I could not be as great a
tyrant by saying, 'You shall not enjoy,' as by saying, 'You shall
suffer.'... You may not be aware of it, most reverend Abraham, but you
deny their freedom to the Catholics upon the same principle that Sarah
your wife refuses to give the receipt for a ham or a gooseberry
dumpling. She values her receipts, not because they secure to her a
certain flavour, but because they remind her that her neighbours want
it--a feeling laughable in a priestess, shameful in a priest; venial
when it withholds the blessings of a ham, tyrannical and execrable
when it narrows the boon of religious freedom."
Letter III. gives utterance to a genuine alarm inspired by Bonaparte's
uninterrupted progress. England is confronted by the most formidable
adversary whom she has ever known, and her defence is entrusted to Canning
and Perceval. Canning's armoury contains nothing more serviceable than
"schoolboy jokes and doggerel rhymes, an affronting petulance, and the
tones and gesticulations of Mr. Pitt." Perceval, instead of looking after
the national defences,
"will bestow the strictest attention on the smaller parts of
ecclesiastical government.
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