"The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots. Whatever your opinion may be of the follies of the Roman Catholic religion, remember they are the follies of four millions of human beings, increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth and intelligence, who, if firmly united with this country, would set at defiance the power of France, and, if once wrested from their alliance with England, would in three years render its existence as an independent nation absolutely impossible. You speak of danger to the Establishment; I request to know when the Establishment was ever so much in danger as when Hoche was in Bantry Bay, and whether all the books of Bossuet, or the arts of the Jesuits, were half so terrible?… Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are—you cannot get rid of them. 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. 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. In the last agonies of England he will bring in a bill to regulate Easter offerings; and he will adjust the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent.[46]… Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the piety of a Christian, and by very wretched imitations of the eloquence of Mr. Pitt, will be done by these two gentlemen";
but these are no adequate defences against the genius and ambition of Bonaparte. "There is nothing to oppose to the conqueror of the world but a small table-wit, and the sallow Surveyor of the Meltings."[47]
Abraham, terrified by those prognostics, asks Peter if he thinks it possible for England to survive the recent misfortunes of Europe. Peter replies that if Bonaparte lives, and a great deal is not immediately conceded to the Roman Catholics, England must perish, and perish in disgrace.—
"It is doubly miserable to become slaves abroad, because we would be tyrants at home; and to perish because we have raised up worse enemies within, from our own bigotry, than we are exposed to without from the unprincipled ambition of France."
Then he goes on to a famous apologue. England is a frigate, attacked by a corsair of immense strength and size. The rigging is cut, there is water in the hold, men are dropping off very fast, the peril is extreme. How do you think the captain (whom we will call Perceval) acts? Does he call all hands on deck and talk to them of king, country, glory, sweethearts, gin, French prisons, wooden shoes, old England, and hearts of oak—till they give three cheers, rush to their guns, and, after a tremendous conflict, succeed in beating off the enemy?—
"Not a syllable of all this: this is not the manner in which the honourable commander goes to work. The first thing he does is to secure twenty or thirty of his prime sailors who happen to be Catholics, to clap them in irons, and set over them a guard of as many Protestants. Having taken this admirable method of defending himself against his infidel opponents, he goes upon deck, reminds the sailors, in a very bitter harangue, that they are of different religions; exhorts the Episcopal gunner not to trust to the Presbyterian quartermaster, issues positive orders that the Catholics should be fired at upon the first appearance of discontent; rushes through blood and brains, examining his men in the Catechism and xxxix. articles, and positively forbids every one to sponge or ram who has not taken the Sacrament according to the Church of England…. Built as she is of heart of oak, and admirably manned, is it possible with such a captain to save this ship from going to the bottom?"