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Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797

"The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)"

In this I have not been left alone. We did not fly from our
undertaking because the people are Mahometans or Pagans, and that a
great majority of the Christians amongst them are Papists. Some
gentlemen in Ireland, I dare say, have good reasons for what they may
do, which do not occur to me. I do not presume to condemn them; but,
thinking and acting as I have done towards those remote nations, I
should not know how to show my face, here or in Ireland, if I should say
that all the Pagans, all the Mussulmen, and even all the Papists, (since
they must form the highest stage in the climax of evil,) are worthy of a
liberal and honorable condition, except those of one of the
descriptions, which forms the majority of the inhabitants of the
country in which you and I were born. If such are the Catholics of
Ireland, ill-natured and unjust people, from our own data, may be
inclined not to think better of the Protestants of a soil which is
supposed to infuse into its sects a kind of venom unknown in other
places.
You hated the old system as early as I did.


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