Supposing the Speaker's office to be only an employment of profit and honour, and a step to a better; since it is in your own gift, will you not choose to bestow it upon some person whose principles the majority of you pretends to approve, if it were only to be sure of a worthy man hereafter in a high station, on the bench or at the bar?
I confess, if it were a thing possible to be compassed, it would seem most reasonable to fill the chair with some person who would be entirely devoted to neither party: But, since there are so few of that character, and those either unqualified or unfriended, I cannot see how a majority will answer it to their reputation, to be so ill provided of able persons, that they must have recourse for a leader to their adversaries, a proceeding of which I never met with above one example, and even that succeeded but ill, though it was recommended by an oracle, which advised some city in Greece to beg a general from their enemies, who, in scorn, sent them either a fiddler or a poet, I have forgot which; but so much I remember, that his conduct was such, as they soon grew weary of him.
You pretend to be heartily resolved against repealing the sacramental test, yet, at the same time, give the only great employment you have to dispose of to a person who will take that test against his stomach (by which word I understand many a man's conscience) who earnestly wisheth it repealed, and will endeavour it to the utmost of his power; so that the first action after you meet, will be a sort of contravention to that test: And will anybody go further than your practice to judge of your principles?
And now I am upon this subject, I cannot conclude without saying something to a very popular argument against that sacramental test, which may be apt to shake many of those who would otherwise wish well enough to it. They say it was a new hardship put upon the Dissenters, without any provocation; and, it is plain, could be no way necessary, because we had peaceably lived together so long without it. They add some other circumstances of the arts by which it was obtained, and the person by whom it was inserted. Surely such people do not consider that the penal laws against Dissenters were made wholly ineffectual by the connivance and mercy of the government, so that all employments of the state lay as open to them as they did to the best and most legal subjects. And what progress they would have made by the advantages of a late conjecture, is obvious to imagine; which I take to be a full answer to that objection.
I remember, upon the transmission of that bill with the test clause inserted, the Dissenters and their partisans, among other topics, spoke much of the good effects produced by the lenity of the government, that the Presbyterians were grown very inconsiderable in their number and quality, and would daily come into the church, if we did not fright them from it by new severities. When the act was passed, they presently changed their style, and raised a clamour, through both kingdoms, of the great numbers of considerable gentry who were laid aside, and could no longer serve their queen and country; which hyperbolical way of reckoning, when it came to be melted down into truth, amounted to about fifteen country justices, most of them of the lowest size, for estate, quality, or understanding. However, this puts me in mind of a passage told me by a great man, though I know not whether it be anywhere recorded. That a complaint was made to the king and council in Sweden, of a prodigious swarm of Scots, who, under the condition of pedlars, infested that kingdom to such a degree, as, if not suddenly prevented, might in time prove dangerous to the state, by joining with any discontented party. Meanwhile the Scots, by their agents, placed a good sum of money to engage the offices of the prime minister in their behalf; who, in order to their defence, told the council, he was assured they were but a few inconsiderable people, that lived honestly and poorly, and were not of any consequence. Their enemies offered to prove the contrary, whereupon an order was made to take their number, which was found to amount, as I remember, to about thirty thousand. The affair was again brought before the council, and great reproaches made the first minister, for his ill computation; who, presently took the other handle, said, he had reason to believe the number yet greater than what was returned; and then gravely offered to the king's consideration, whether it were safe to render desperate so great a body of able men, who had little to lose, and whom any hard treatment would only serve to unite into a power capable of disturbing, if not destroying the peace of the kingdom. And so they were suffered to continue.