If the absurd persons you mention find no way of providing for liberty,
but by overturning this happy Constitution, and introducing a frantic
democracy, let us take care how we prevent better people from any
rational expectations of partaking in the benefits of that Constitution
_as it stands_. The maxims you establish cut the matter short. They have
no sort of connection with the good or the ill behavior of the persons
who seek relief, or with the proper or improper means by which they seek
it. They form a perpetual bar to all pleas and to all expectations.
You begin by asserting, that "the Catholics ought to enjoy all things
_under_ the state, but that they ought not to _be the state_": a
position which, I believe, in the latter part of it, and in the latitude
there expressed, no man of common sense has ever thought proper to
dispute; because the contrary implies that the state ought to be in them
_exclusively_. But before you have finished the line, you express
yourself as if the other member of your proposition, namely, that "they
ought not to be a _part_ of the state," were necessarily included in the
first,--whereas I conceive it to be as different as a part is from the
whole, that is, just as different as possible.
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