Note 3 — THE DANGERS OF THE COUNTRY.

"We have now lying before us both the printed and manuscript copy of the petition of a valued friend (the late Rev. W. Howells, of Long Acre) against the bill for granting to Roman Catholics the privilege of paralysing the hands and obstructing the labour of Protestant statesmen. At page 92, in the Memoirs of that eminent man, published by his friend and executor, Mr Bowdler, our readers will find that petition speaking with little less than prophetic voice of the confusion and misery certain to follow a measure which every Protestant, in proportion to the clearness of his views of Divine truth, must consider a downright infraction of his allegiance to his God.

"We quote three of the clauses in the petition alluded to, and we ask whether the fears therein expressed have not been fulfilled to the very letter:—

"'That the concession of the elective franchise has not only multiplied the crimes and aggravated the miseries of Ireland, but shaken likewise the very foundation of the glorious British constitution, the majority of Irish votes being virtually at the disposal of a demoralising, disloyal, turbulent, and traitorous priesthood.

"'That the concession of the representative franchise would be productive of further and progressive evils, and enable Romanists either to prosecute a successful crusade for supremacy, or involve the country in all the horrors of a civil war.

"'That the grant of the representative franchise would soon introduce into the British Senate such an influx of members from each side the Channel, as would, by voting together on all occasions of emergency, control your honourable house and the other estates of the realm, DICTATE TO THE MINISTERS OF THE CROWN, AND FORCE THEM INTO ANY MEASURES they pleased.'"

"Lord Eldon's Predictions in 1829, on the third reading of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill.

"The following predictions of this venerable nobleman were at the time sneered at as the senile and effete expressions of a bigoted octogenarian. What a lesson has he left to those who now hold the rudder of the state in their hands!—

"'I know that, sooner or later, this bill will overturn the aristocracy and the monarchy. What I have stated is my notion of the danger to the Establishment. Have they not Roman Catholic archbishops for every Protestant archbishop—Roman Catholic deans for every Protestant dean? Did not the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics dispute against Henry VIII. in defence of the power of the Pope? and in Mary's time were not the laws affecting the Roman Catholics repealed, not by the authority of Parliament, but through the influence of the Pope's legate? And even though you suppress these Roman Catholics who utter these seditious, treasonable, abominable, and detestable speeches, others will arise who will utter speeches more treasonable, more abominable, and more detestable. No sincere Roman Catholic could or did look for less than a Roman Catholic king and a Roman Catholic parliament. Their lordships might flatter themselves that the dangers he had anticipated were visionary, and God forbid that he should say, that those who voted for the third reading of the bill will not have done so conscientiously, believing that no danger exists or can be apprehended from it. But in so voting, they had not that knowledge of the danger in which they were placing the great, the paramount interests of this Protestant state,—they had not that knowledge of its true interests and situation, which they ought to have. Those with whom we are dealing are too wary to apprise you by any indiscreet conduct of the danger to which you are exposed. When those dangers shall have arrived, I shall have been consigned to the urn, the sepulchre, and mortality; but that they will arrive, I have no more doubt than that I yet continue to exist.'"—Bell's Life in London, Dec. 21, 1850.