In Wales they were believed to
form the majority. In Scotland three-fourths of the people were
Presbyterians; and in Ireland the Roman Catholics outnumbered the
Protestants in nearly the same proportion. Taking England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland together, a calculation which reckoned the
different sects of Protestant and Roman Catholic Non-conformists united
at half the entire population would probably not have erred very widely
from the truth.
It must have been the aim of every statesman deserving of the name to
weld these different religious parties into one harmonious whole, as far
as their civil position went. And measures which had that tendency could
not be foreign to the constitution, properly understood. A constitution
which confines its benefits to one-half of a nation hardly merits the
title of a constitution at all. For every constitution ought to extend
its protection and its privileges equally to every portion of the
people, unless there be some peculiarity in the principles or habits of
any one portion which makes its participation in them dangerous to the
rest. It had undoubtedly been the doctrine of Pitt, and of the greater
part of those who since his time had held the reins of government, that
if any portion of the King's subjects did cherish a temper dangerous to
the rest, it was because they were debarred from privileges to which
they conceived themselves to have a just right, and that their
discontent and turbulence were the fruit of the restrictions imposed on
them.
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