altogether irrelevant to the argument; for the very ground which the mover had taken, was, that the law, which he wished to repeal, was originally occasioned by, and adapted to peculiar circumstances; and it was of little consequence, whether you agreed with him, or differed from him, as to the precise nature of the circumstances, provided you allowed, that the act in question was the result of special exigencies, and not of general principles. Mr. Peel subsequently employed weapons of better temper; insisting, first that the 30th of Charles II. had been adopted and sanctioned by the revolution, long after the passions and intrigues of 1678 had ceased to work, and secondly, that if Catholic peers were admitted into the House of Lords, without any securities or restraints, the doors of the House of Commons must also be thrown open to Catholics; without reference to any of those guarantees and precautions, which even the friends of emancipation had hitherto thought to be necessary.

Mr. Plunkett followed the same course of argument (we ought to say, of observation), which had been taken by the mover. Nothing, he said, could be more simple than the object of his right hon. friend; for he merely proposed to repeal a part of an act, which excluded a few Irish and British peers from their seats in the upper house. Those peers had been restored to the privilege of approaching their sovereign; and the intended measure would only enable them to defend in their places in parliáment the advice which they had privately given. No objection had been stated to the justice or the expediency of the general measure

no apprehensions of danger had been

uttered no attempt had been made to show, that it would be bestowed on the unworthy. It had been opposed only on points of etiquette, and the debate upon it had been turned to the discussion of disputed portions of history. It was said that the motion ought not to be agreed to, because the concession here made would only lay the ground for additional demand, and because this was a partial measure, preparatory to the general scheme. This was no objection to those who had brought forward and supported the general measure last year, and he would be glad, before it was again submitted to the House, where it had been then lost, to see those who sat in it, called upon as men, as gentlemen, and men of honour, to receive among them those peers who had originally been unjustly deprived of their privileges, or to state the grounds, in law and justice, of their continued exclusion. He hoped, that, when these peers knocked at the door for admission, they who opposed their entrance would be able to state the principle of right and justice on which they acted, and would not sanction rules which would place their own valued privileges and hereditary distinctions at the mercy of some Titus Oates of after times. This measure of justice was to reverse an act of attainder passed on the evidence of the most infamous of mankind, and in circumstances of alarm which had now for ever disappeared. The cause of the exclusion had not been, that the Catholic peers were dangerous counsellors, but because the House of Commons in the reign of Charles II., suspected the king of being a Catholic, and dreaded a Catholic successor to the throne. It

wascertain, that if a bill of exclusion against the latter could have passed, this bill of attainder against the peers would never have passed. But the innocent had been proscribed and punished, because an exclusion bill could not be carried. The guiltless had been attainted, because the proper object of attack could not be reached.

Mr. Wetherell argued the question on general grounds; and indeed was the only speaker in the debate, who did not deviate from the subject into mere desultory remark. The impatience of the House, however, prevented him from going fully into the discussion.

On a division, Mr. Canning's motion was carried by a majority of 5; the Ayes being 249, and the Noes, 244.

On the motion for the second reading of the bill, which was made on the 10th of May, Mr. Wetherell spoke at great length and very elaborately against it. He considered that the present measure was incoherent and unjustifiable, unless regarded as a pledge and declaration, that every political disqualification on account of religion was to be abolished, with out restriction or modification; so that it depended on a proposition, which could never be maintained, and, which, far from having been recognised by parliament, had never been advanced, even by the warmest advocates of Catholic emancipation.

Mr. Peel also continued his opposition, pursuing a line of argument somewhat more enlarged than on the former occasion. He did not, he said, resist the present measure because it was partial; for there were some partial measures to which he should not object, such,

for instance, as that of placing the English and Irish Roman Catholics on the same footing, or that of granting the distinction of a silk gown, and other privileges, short of the judicial functions, to Roman Catholic barristers. There was a great distinction between a specific and a partial measure; and his objection to the present measure was, that it was partial in its operation, while it was general in its principle. It had been argued, that there could be no danger in restoring a few noblemen of distinguished rank and excellent character, to the privileges which their ancestors enjoyed; but, could any man of common sense fail to see the sophistry of this argument? The question was not, whether half a dozen individuals should be restored to the privileges of their ancestors, but whether the disabilities affecting one branch of the legislature should be removed, while they continued to be imposed on the other-whether the Crown should have the power of creating an unlimited number of Roman Catholic peers, while the people had not the power of returning to the House of Commons a limited number of Roman Catholic representatives. It had been contended, that the disabilities affecting the peers ought to be removed first, because they were latest imposed upon them; but if there was any validity in that argument, it would go to prove that all restrictions should be first removed from the throne.-With regard to securities, that part of the subject had not been discussed in the last debate, and in his opinion it would have been better to pass it over in silence, than to allude to it in so ominous a manner as in the present discussion. They

were now told, that these securities were never necessary, that they had been adopted merely for the purpose of quieting some ridiculous and exaggerated fears of Protestant bigots, and that the best security was to be derived from the unqualified admission of our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects to the enjoyment of equal rights and privileges. If such was the language adopted now, and the present bill were to pass without any securities, what would be the arguments employed, with regard to securities, when the general question came to be discussed in the next session?

Lord Londonderry and Mr. Canning supported the argument for the bill. The ground they took was, that no danger could be apprehended from this specific mea

sure.

The question being put, the Ayes were 235, the Noes 223, which left a majority of 12 for the bill. No discussion or division occurred on the third reading.

The bill having gone through the previous stages in the House of Lords, the second reading of it was moved on the 22nd of June by the duke of Portland. Lord Colchester took the lead in the opposition to it, by a very concise, but very able speech, in which he expounded the general principles of the policy which ought to be pursued towards the Catholics, and illustrated and confirmed these principles by a reference to the actual state and spirit of the Catholic religion.

The lord chancellor followed on the same side, and spoke with unusual force and vehemence. Even the bill of last year, said he, the most amazing thing he had seen in the course of a long life,

and loaded as it was with nonsensical trash about bulls and dispensations; even that bill had proposed its securities; but here was concession made to the Catholics; concession great in form, and complete in substance; and not one syllable inserted with respect to securities to the Protestant church. It might be said that this was a particular measure, and had nothing to do with the general one. But that he would deny. When their lordships should have passed the bill now before them, it would be out of their power hereafter to deliberate as they ought on any further concession. On looking at the bill in its original shape, he was disposed to think that he had been misled by some foolish fellow of a printer, who had gotten hold of the wrong manuscript. The bill, to his great astonishment, proposed to repeal an act of Charles II. It was not a little extraordinary that the right hon. gentleman (Mr. Canning), whom he wished very well, whatever part of the world he might go to, assisted as he had been by the labours of many lawyers, should pretend to repeal an act which had been repealed a hundred years ago. This absurdity, however, had been got over; and its advocates went on to say, that the circumstances and causes which existed in the time of Charles II., were now removed, and, therefore, that the bill ought to be adopted, without ever considering whether the circumstances and causes, which had called forth repeated enactments since that period, had all disappeared with those that existed at the time of Charles II. In his opinion, if Titus Oates had never been born, the same enactments would have taken place. He could not forget

what Russell had said of popery, what Sidney had said of it. In looking to the spirit of the times, and the principle upon which those enactments rested, the question was, whether the measures taken by William, queen Anne, and George the I. and II., for the security of the Protestant establishment, should or should not be repealed? In all the indemnity acts that were passed, no allusion was made to the act of Charles II., but merely to those which he had just mentioned. He was anxious to provide for tomorrow as well as to-day; and not being able to foresee what might happen, he was desirous to retain the securities, which our ancestors, at the Revolution, considered to be necessary. He might be told, indeed, that no acts, not even those of the Revolution, could be considered fundamental; that the legislature of one day could not bind the legislature of another; but it accorded with the principles of legislation to say of certain acts, that posterity should be cautious how they disturbed them. The acts, to which he now alluded, were stated at the time to be fundamental, and binding for ever; which marked at least the importance attached to them by our ancestors. What was the language of king William in all his communications? He had stated repeatedly that some permanent settle ment should be made, in order, that the religion and liberties of the country might never again be put into danger. And what did our ancestors do? They, long after they had ceased to be frightened by Titus Oates, reenacted the disability of the Catholic peers to sit in parliaThey provided that the

ment.

Lords should be Protestant, the Commons Protestant, and the King Protestant also. They even took care to provide, that he should marry a Protestant; and, not content with all that, they added a coronation oath, by which the king bound himself to support the Protestant religion, as by law established. At the time of the Revolution they made the church and state Protestant, and the king could not take his seat on the throne without pledging himself to protect both church and state, under the obligation of an oath. They had determined, that the parlialiament should be Protestant as well as the king; and the Bill of Rights declared, that that should be the law for ever. He did not mean to say, that parliament had not the power to alter the law, if they should think proper; but he would say, that they ought to proceed with great caution in a question of such vast importance, and hesitate before they passed so great a censure upon those who effected the Revolution. If any other proof was wanting that the exclusion of Catholic peers was not a temporary occasional measure, but an essential part of the permanent constitutional policy of the country, as understood by our forefathers, it was to be found in the act of Union with Scotland, which most anxiously and expressly provided, that no man, who was not a Protestant should elect or be elected to a seat in either House.

The Lord Chancellor then proceeded to consider the acts passed in the reigns of Geo. I. & II., which ratified, or recognized, the exclusion of Catholic peers. Their being adopted without reference to the peculiar circumstances of the reign of Charles II., were so many in

trovertible proofs, that the promoters of the present measure had placed it on ground altogether untenable. Soon after the Revolution, an act was passed which had nothing to do with the causes that produced the act of Charles II., and yet recognized the provisions of that measure. In the same way, the act of George I., without referring to the Revolution, or the causes that produced it, alluded to all the acts and declarations which had sprung out of it, and re-enacted them all. He next mentioned the act of indemnity passed in the reign of George II., in the preamble to which, the causes and circumstances that gave rise to the act of Charles II. were enumerated; and he contended, that their lordships could not agree to the present measure, without saying that all the causes and circumstances, which occasioned the various acts from the time of Charles II. up to the last year, had ceased to exist. How, he demanded, could such an assertion be made by those, who, year after year, when bringing bills into parliament on this very subject, ushered them in with a declaration, that they could not think of touching the Protestant establishment in church and state, and therefore proposed what they called securities, though to him they appeared to be no securities at all? How any one could introduce such a measure as the present, and at the same time say, that it could have no effect on the general measure of emancipation, he could not conceive. He knew not the meaning of excluding one body of people from the House of Commons, while another body, professing the same faith, were admitted into the House of Peers. If RoVOL. LXIV.

man Catholics were once admitted to sit in that House, they must also of necessity sit in the other. Would the noble mover of the bill abrogate any of those enactments, which, with respect to religion, affected the sovereign? Would he allow the king to marry a papist? If the noble mover, from a conscientious feeling, would prevent his sovereign from marrying a papist, he, from an equally conscientious feeling, must object to the introduction of Roman Catholics to that House. He was quite sure that if he agreed to this specific measure, he could not resist any other. It was nothing more nor less, than a motion for general emancipation; and therefore he could not consent to its adoption. In a short time, it would be of very little consequence, to what he did or to what he did not consent; but while he had the power, he would endeavour to discharge his duty firmly. It was repeatedly urged, that the question of emancipation would be carried sooner or later. He did not believe it; and he thought the oftener the assertion was made, the less chance there was of its being confirmed. If these were the last words he ever spoke, he should say, that should this measure be carried, then the liberties of his country, as settled at the revolution, the laws of his country as established by the securities formed at that time for the preservation of her freedom, were all gone; but he should have the pleasure to reflect, that he had not been accessory to their destruction.

Lord Grey, in reply to the lord chancellor, contended, that the acts subsequent to the revolution, which coincided in effect with the 30th of Charles II., had been

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