(the Roman Catholics) should be allowed the exercise of their religious duties. It was his settled maxim that persecution for religious principles only added strength to the sect it was intended to destroy.
But although the Lord-Lieutenant, in a speech of three quarters of an hour, urged his views very strongly, the Privy Council, after a long debate, threw out Lord Clanbrassil's bill by a majority of fourteen to twelve.[1]
The law which existed in England at this tune is thus described by Mr. Burke:—
'A statute was fabricated in 1699, by which the saying mass was forged into a crime punishable with perpetual imprisonment. The teaching school, an useful and virtuous occupation, even the teaching in a private family, was in every Catholic subjected to the same unproportioned punishment.'[2] This persecuting law was repealed on the motion of Sir George Savile in 1778. It was, I think, upon Lord North's giving his hearty assent to the principles of toleration on which this bill was founded, that Fox quoted with prodigious effect the lines,—
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight, &c.
In 1793 Roman Catholics in Ireland were admitted to the exercise of the elective franchise. This was a
- ↑ Correspondence of Duke of Bedford, vol. ii. Introduction.
- ↑ Speech at Bristol, previous to the election.
