As to the plan to which these maxims are applied, I cannot speak, as I told you, positively about it:  because neither from your letter, nor from any in formation I have been able to collect, do I find anything settled, either on the part of the Roman Catholics themselves, or on that of any persons who may wish to conduct their affairs in Parliament.  But if I have leave to conjecture, something is in agitation towards admitting them, under certain qualifications, to have some share in the election of members of Parliament.  This I understand is the scheme of those who are entitled to come within your description of persons of consideration, property, and character,—­and firmly attached to the king and Constitution, as by “law established, with a grateful sense of your former concessions, and a patient reliance on the benignity of Parliament for the further mitigation of the laws that still affect them.”—­As to the low, thoughtless, wild, and profligate, who have joined themselves with those of other professions, but of the same character, you are not to imagine that for a moment I can suppose them to be met with anything else than the manly and enlightened energy of a firm government, supported by the united efforts of all virtuous men, if ever their proceedings should become so considerable as to demand its notice.  I really think that such associations should be crushed in their very commencement.

Setting, therefore, this case out of the question, it becomes an object of very serious consideration, whether, because wicked men of various descriptions are engaged in seditious courses, the rational, sober, and valuable part of one description should not be indulged in their sober and rational expectations.  You, who have looked deeply into the spirit of the Popery laws, must be perfectly sensible that a great part of the present mischief which we abhor in common (if it at all exists) has arisen from them.  Their declared object was, to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education.  The professed object was, to deprive the few men, who, in spite of those laws, might hold or obtain any property amongst them, of all sort of influence or authority over the rest.  They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy, or connection.  One of these bodies was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education:  the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them.  Are we to be astonished, when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation, continued without intermission for near an hundred years, we had reduced them to a mob, that, whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight?  Surely it might be just now a matter of temperate discussion, whether you ought not to apply a remedy to the real cause of