as Scotch Irish. Cromwell rushed like a gaunt dog to swallow what prey was left, and placed his needy enthusiasts thickly in the richest places of the island. William's Dutchmen were next provided for, and every needy foreign Protestant, by entering a corporate town or city, paying a shilling to its town clerk, and taking an oath of allegiance to the king and of execration of Catholic doctrines, was clothed with civic honours to which a native Catholic never could aspire. Swarms of those men flocked in from every place in which a Protestant was ever found, and were invested with wealth and power, whilst the native Catholics, forced by misery and oppression from their native land, became the hewers of wood and the drawers of water to every civilized nation of the globe. The clergy were made the sport, and the victims of the dregs of the Protestant population. The Sunday amusement of some of the inhabitants of my former parish was, about sixty years since, to scour the country, "priest hunting," and wo be to the priest who was caught! The very name of priest was a term of reproach; I have been myself, since I was admitted to orders, as well as many of my brethren, insulted repeatedly from the circumstance of our being clergymen, and this by persons who moved in the several classes of society, from the Protestant culprit who had been sentenced to be hanged, but was not, to the judge who passed the sentence: from the Orange freeman, the price of whose vote was his chief means of support, to the proud peer whose vote spurned our petition for the common rights of subjects; from the miserable sexton to the supercilious incumbent of a bishopric. I have heard one, who swelled from the diminutive size of an almost expiring foundling, to the full bulk of aldermanic ponderosity, utter, in a dialect like English, his contempt for certain Romish priests, and those Romish priests were venerable bishops, decorated with the well-earned honours of the best universities of Europe, and as estimable for their virtues as they were humble in their demeanour. But to insult the Catholic priesthood was not only the privilege of the Irish Protestant, the exercise of this privilege was, by many, thought to be the proof of liberality.

You will ask me, why all this amplification? Why remind us of the bad feeling of past time? Certainly, not to exasperate. I can fully answer to my conscience-not for any uncharitable purpose. But for the purpose of understanding fully the subject of which I am about to treat; and to warn you of danger: I shall now apply it to that purpose. I assert, that amongst the principal part of the Protestant population which at present opposes your restoration to your rights, those unbecoming feelings still exist. They are, at the present day, the feelings of

the Orangeman; they are the feelings of the grand juries of several counties; they are the feelings of a large portion of the British legislature. I shall prove those propositions by plain evidence before I close these letters.

I then ask, what can be the object of men who feel thus towards the Catholic clergy in consenting to have them pensioned by government, in place of being supported by the people? Can they have any object beneficial or honourable to that clergy? But they do not leave us any room for conjecture; they give us positive evidence: they say, that the object is to make the clergy more loyal, by making them dependent upon the crown for their income. When they avow this to be their object, will you say it is not? When history proves this must be their object, will you reject the analogy upon which the proof is founded, when they refer to that very analogy?

What was the testimony of the Honourable Denis Browne, one of the members for the county of Mayo, before the committee of the House of Lords? That Catholic emancipation would be of no use for the tranquility of Ireland, unless the clergy were pensioned. That the clergy now made the people disaffected, but if the clergy were to be paid by the crown and not by the people, the clergy would be the most enthusiastic loyalists. He instanced the case of the Presbyterians. Before their clergy in Ireland were paid by the crown he said they were the most factious and seditious men in Ireland: and they made their flocks turbulent and disaffected. The crown paid them, and they were loyal, and their flocks were more attached to government. Such was his opinion of the pensioning system. The object which he had in view was, through the cupidity of the priesthood, to insure the loyalty of the people. What does old Denis Browne mean by loyalty? Such an attachment to the executive parts of your government as exists amongst the established clergy, and is making rapid progress amongst the Presbyterians. An attachment perfectly incompatible with civil liberty. My friend, we have in this country, civil and religious liberty in their full perfection. It is true that the constitutions of North Carolina and New Jersey are essentially illiberal, and that the misrepresentations of British writers have here created great prejudices against Roman Catholics. But if those constitutions were to be revised, there is no question but the bigotry which disgraces them would be swept away: and honest and assiduous investigation for truth is correcting those serious misrepresentations: the people of America cannot be asked for their assent, without exhibiting to them a sufficient ground for the claim.

I stated that we had here the perfection of civil and religious lib

erty; there is not a doubt upon my mind, but that if the clergy of these states were to be pensioned by the general government, instead of being maintained by the people, our constitution would rapidly decay; and one of the wisest provisions which this confederation ever made, is to be found in the first amendment to its constitution, declaring that Congress has no power to establish any religion. What is meant by loyalty amongst your very loyal people of Ireland, is not that which your constitution means by the expression. One of your very loyal men in Ireland, would call a man who complained of the interference of the ministers of the crown with the election of the members of the House of Commons, a rebel who was grossly disloyal. He would plead before those same ministers as the proof of his own loyalty, that he inquired what candidate the oligarchy preferred, and that by right and by wrong, he exerted himself to have this man returned. This loyalist is disloyal to your constitution, but he is faithful to the executive. The meaning of loyalty in Ireland is a ready subserviency to the king's minister. Mr. Browne then states that pensioning the clergy would make them subservient to the executive, or to the king's ministers, or in other words, to the oligarchy by which you are ruled. Have you any doubt but that this would be the effect of the pensioning? Was not this effect produced amongst the Presbyterians? Is not the clergy of the establishment enslaved by this very principle; though, as I will show you, their state is really more independent than that of your clergy would be? How often have I heard you use this argument, and vary its exemplification through every trope and comparison which you could find? How often have I heard you tell our assembled thousands, that if the bishops so far overlooked their religious obligation as to accept of pensions for themselves and for the priesthood; you would, as a friend to the liberties of your country, protest against placing so formidable a force in the hands of the minister of the crown to direct against the proper independence of the people? If you have forgotten this, I have not; and Ireland remembers it.

I take two views of this pensioning system: I see it not only concurred in, but actually brought forward by the most insidious enemies of the Irish Catholic church. I suspect, and not without a cause, the gifts of my avowed enemies. Whence arises this kindness of the illiberal portion of your pretended friends? Is it love for you incites them? My friend, they have urged the north wind to blow its violent hurricane upon you; you did abide its fury, but you wrapped your cloak about you, and rolled in your religious mantle, you more tenaciously preserved what it was sought to take away. The rage of the tempest has

passed; a few clouds still remain; occasional gusts make you cautious; but if they shall subside, and the sunbeams cheer you, this cloak will be no longer necessary; you will cast it aside, and when it shall have been removed, how are you to protect yourself if the same spirit of the winds, whose power will still continue, should again sweep your country! Your clergy will have been severed from your people. Suppose the peasantry oppressed, and the clergyman threatened with the loss of his wages, if he will stand by them, where is your remedy? This is no metaphysical supposition. In my next I shall give ample proof; at present I ask you, is it not to prevent the clergyman from telling the people of their wrongs that it is sought to make him a pensioner of the crown? The wolves ask your dogs, and you will give them up; what have the wolves offered in return? To allow a few of your bellwethers the use of a clover pasture? Have the wolves permitted you to extract their teeth or to bind their jaws? I must conclude this in haste, and resume the topic in my next.

Yours sincerely,

To Daniel O'Connell, Esq.

JOHN, Bishop of Charleston.

LETTER IX

CHARLESTON, S. C., Sept. 10, 1825.

My Dear Friend:-I now assert that it is a principle of the British executive to crush, if it can, in its dominions, any power, however small, which might exist independent of itself: but if it cannot crush it, its efforts will be directed to make this power become dependent upon it, and if it be in any way dependent, its exertions will still be directed to increase that dependence. Thus, during a long series of years, it has been making gradual inroads upon the civil rights of the people. The church was a spiritual power not dependent upon the crown, in the Saxon times. William of Normandy, at the time of the conquest, made a change in ecclesiastical property similar to that which he made in civil titles, and as in the latter he substituted fiefs and infeudations for allodial tenure, so in the church he substituted benefices for frankalmoigne. William Rufus went still farther; but his attempts were cut short, perhaps unintentionally, by the arrow of Tyrrell. Very few of the Plantagenet dynasty abstained from similar attempts. The aggressions of Henry II., notwithstanding constitutional and canonical impediments, caused, at first, the vacillation and subsequently the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket. The aggression of the

crown and the resistance of the church is a usual and ordinary historical topic, until the destruction of that church by Henry VIII., the founder of the new body which became its substitute; of which the king being head, the contention necessarily ceased. In Ireland the Catholic prelates were thrust out of their possessions, and the men who were substituted for them, being dependent upon the executive, were by it upheld and cherished. The efforts of the crown were then directed, as we have before seen, to the extermination of the old hierarchy, which now subsisted independent of any power but God and the people.

After those means, which I have alluded to in my last letter, had been found unavailing, when the very executioner turned away in fatigue and disgust from the prolonged and useless havoc, a mitigated persecution tortured the spirit, plundered the property, but generally spared the life and limbs of the Catholic. His church was humble but it was independent. Like the Apostles and their early successors, the good prelates of the Irish church felt and knew that their kingdom was not of this world. They derived no power from the crown, they claimed no temporal authority, they challenged no civil obedience; they told their flocks to render unto God the things that were God's, and to render unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. They merely superintended the religious concerns of their faithful people, and in return the people gave them affection and support.

There was also a large body of Presbyterians in Ireland, whose clergy were independent of the crown, being supported by the voluntary contributions of their flocks. At this period that clergy and their flocks felt and acted freely and constitutionally for the benefit of Ireland, and Ireland, after ages of misrule and of oppression, began to vindicate her rights and to obtain a constitution; the crown, in its bounty, bestowed a gift upon the Presbyterian clergy: they became dependent upon the crown; and the supporters of the encroachments of prerogative have no longer the same dread of that body that their predecessors had.

The crown observed that the Catholics were increasing in numbers, and in power, and in wealth, and that their clergy, which had so long been the object of the most bitter hatred, and most barbarous persecution, still retained its independence: accordingly, Lord Castlereagh, and others, gave a miserable dole out of the public purse, to establish a college for the education of candidates for orders in Ireland, that they should not imbibe the principles of other governments in continental seminaries, and to create amongst them an attachment to their native land and to its constitution. I look upon this policy to be correct and