Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/42

 (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.

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.' This persecuting law was repealed on the motion of Sir George Savile in 1778.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,—

In 1793 Roman Catholics in Ireland were admitted to the exercise of the elective franchise. This was a