It
would be to pay a poor compliment to your understanding or your heart.
Neither _your_ religion nor _your_ politics consist "in odd, perverse
antipathies." You are not resolved to persevere in proscribing from the
Constitution so many millions of your countrymen, because, in
contradiction to experience and to common sense, you think proper to
imagine that their principles are subversive of common human society. To
that I shall only say, that whoever has a temper which can be gratified
by indulging himself in these good-natured fancies ought to do a great
deal more. For an exclusion from the privileges of British subjects is
not a cure for so terrible a distemper of the human mind as they are
pleased to suppose in their countrymen. I rather conceive a
participation in those privileges to be itself a remedy for some mental
disorders.
As little shall I detain you with matters that can as little obtain
admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear,
that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great
Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious
bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than
to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their
allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his
viceroy; or that, by the plenitude of his power, he will take that
fierce tyrant, the king of the French, out of his jail, and arm that
nation (which on all occasions treats his Holiness so very politely)
with his bulls and pardons, to invade poor old Ireland, to reduce you to
Popery and slavery, and to force the free-born, naked feet of your
people into the wooden shoes of that arbitrary monarch.
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