Chapter VII: Letter IV: begins with a reply to those who contended that England ought

not to pay for the education of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland.

"The whole sum now appropriated by Government to the religious
education of four millions of Christians is £13,000--a sum about one
hundred times as large being appropriated in the same country to about
one-eighth part of this number of Protestants. When it was proposed to
raise this grant from £8000 to £13,000, its present amount, this sum
was objected to by that most indulgent of Christians, Mr. Spencer
Perceval, as enormous; he himself having secured for his own eating
and drinking, and the eating and drinking of the Master and Miss
Percevals, the reversionary sum of £21,000 a year of the public
money,[48] and having just failed in a desperate and rapacious attempt
to secure to himself for life the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster;
and the best of it is, that this Minister, after abusing his
predecessors for their impious bounty to the Catholics, has found
himself compelled, from the apprehension of immediate danger, to grant
the sum in question."

Abraham now goes on to plead that our present relations with the Roman Catholics date from the Revolution of 1688, and that laws passed at that period are unalterable. To this Peter replies:--

"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it
produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool....
Besides, it happens that, to the principal incapacities under which
the Irish suffer, they were subjected _after_ that great and
glorious Revolution, to which we are indebted for so many
blessings.... The Catholics were not excluded from the Irish House of
Commons, or military commands, before the 3rd and 4th of William and
Mary, and the 1st and 2nd of Queen Anne."

Then he goes on to cite the example of Scotland. There the English government had, in times past, tried to force the national conscience in matters of faith and worship. The government had failed, as it deserved to fail, for Scotland was resolute and rebellious. Then "the true and only remedy was applied. The Scotch were suffered to worship God after their own tiresome manner, without pain, penalty, and privation." And Scotland had become a contented, loyal, and profitable part of the United Kingdom. Exactly the reverse was happening in Ireland. A vehement hostility to the Union was spreading through all parts of the country and all classes of the people.

"The Irish see that their national independence is gone, without
having recovered any single one of those advantages which they were
taught to expect from the sacrifice. All good things were to flow from
the Union; they have none of them gained anything. Every man's pride
is wounded by it; no man's interest is promoted. In the seventh year
of that Union, four million Catholics, lured by all kinds of promises
to yield up the separate dignity and sovereignty of their country, are
forced to squabble with such a man as Mr. Spencer Perceval for five
thousand pounds with which to educate their children in their own mode
of worship; he, the same Mr. Spencer, having secured to his own
Protestant self a reversionary portion of the public money amounting
to four times that sum.... Our conduct to Ireland, during the whole of
this war, has been that of a man who subscribes to hospitals, weeps at
charity-sermons, carries out broth and blankets to beggars, and then
comes home and beats his wife and children. We have compassion for the
victims of all other oppression and injustice, except our own."

It is of no use for statesmen to ignore the Irish question. It is much too urgent and too dangerous a topic to be long suppressed.--

"A man may command his family to say nothing more about the stone, and
surgical operations; but the ponderous malice still lies upon the
nerve, and gets so big that the patient breaks his own law of silence,
clamours for the knife, and expires under its late operation. Believe
me, you talk folly when you speak of suppressing the Irish question. I
wish to God that the case admitted of such a remedy ... but, if the
wants of the Catholics are not heard in the manly tones of Lord
Grenville, or the servile drawl of Lord Castlereagh, they will be
heard ere long in the madness of mobs, and the conflicts of armed
men."

In Letter V. Peter turns upon Abraham, who cannot believe that England will ever be ruined and conquered, and says:--

"Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian
Plymleys. But the English are brave? So were all these nations. You
might get together an hundred thousand men individually brave; but,
without generals capable of commanding such a machine, it would be as
useless as a first-rate man-of-war manned by Oxford clergymen or
Parisian shopkeepers. I do not say this to the disparagement of
English officers: they have had no means of acquiring experience. But
I do say it to create alarm. We do not appear to me to be half alarmed
enough, or to entertain that sense of our danger which leads to the
most obvious means of self-defence. As for the spirit of the
peasantry, in making a gallant defence behind hedgerows and through
plate-racks and hencoops, highly as I think of their bravery, I do not
know any nation in Europe so likely to be struck with panic as the
English; and this from their total unacquaintance with the science of
war. Old wheat and beans blazing for twenty miles round--cart-mares
shot--sows of Lord Somerville's[49] breed running wild over the
country--the minister of the parish wounded sorely in his hinder
parts--Mrs. Plymley in fits--all these scenes of war an Austrian or a
Russian has seen three or four times over. But it is now three
centuries since an English pig has fallen in fair battle upon English
ground, or a farm-house been rifled.... But whatever was our
conduct--if every ploughman was as great a hero as he who was called
from his oxen to save Rome from her enemies--I should still say that,
at such a crisis, you want the affections of all your subjects in both
islands. There is no spirit which you must alienate, no heart you must
avert. Every man must feel he has a country, and that there is an
urgent and pressing cause why he should expose himself to death."

Although Peter is so seriously concerned about the military disasters which will fall on England unless she behaves more wisely to her Roman Catholic population, he is not the least afraid of any dangers arising from the Roman Catholic religion. England has done with it, once for all--

"Tell me that the world will return again under the influence of the
smallpox; that Lord Castlereagh will hereafter oppose the power of the
court; that Lord Howick and Mr. Grattan will each of them do a mean
and dishonourable action; that anybody who has heard Lord Redesdale
speak will knowingly and willingly hear him again; that Lord Eldon has
assented to the fact of two and two making four, without shedding
tears, or expressing the smallest doubt or scruple; tell me any other
thing absurd or incredible, but, for the love of common sense, let me
hear no more of the danger to be apprehended from the general
diffusion of Popery. It is too absurd to be reasoned upon; every man
feels it is nonsense when he hears it stated, and so does every man
while he is stating it."

No, the only real danger which Peter sees--and this he sees with startling clearness--is that Ireland will be absorbed by France, and will welcome her deliverance from England; that the civil existence of England will be most seriously imperilled; and that the Irish themselves will, in the long-run, suffer grievously by the change,--

"Who can doubt but that Ireland will experience ultimately from France
a treatment to which the conduct they have experienced from England is
the love of a parent or a brother? Who can doubt that, five years
after he has got hold of the country, Ireland will be tossed by
Bonaparte as a present to some one of his ruffian generals, who will
knock the head of Mr. Keogh against the head of Cardinal Troy, shoot
twenty of the most noisy blockheads of the Roman persuasion, wash his
pug-dogs in holy water, and confiscate the salt butter of the Milesian
Republic to the last tub? But what matters this? or who is wise enough
in Ireland to heed it? or when had common sense much influence with my
poor dear Irish? Mr. Perceval does not know the Irish; but I know
them, and I know that, at every rash and mad hazard, they will break
the Union, revenge their wounded pride and their insulted religion,
and fling themselves into the open arms of France, sure of dying in
the embrace.... In the six hundredth year of our Empire over Ireland,
have we any memorial of ancient kindness to refer to? any people, any
zeal, any country, on which we can depend? Have we any hope, but in
the winds of heaven and the tides of the sea? any prayer to prefer to
the Irish, but that they should forget and forgive their oppressors,
who, in the very moment that they are calling upon them for their
exertions, solemnly assure them that the oppression shall still
remain?"