There could be no doubt
that, in the most modified application of it, it struck at the root of
the principle of protection, which had hitherto been the fundamental
principle of our finance, and made a farther extension of it inevitable.
And, as he had been one of the leading members of the ministry which
carried Catholic Emancipation, so he now proceeded on the same path of
religious toleration; and, in the session of 1844, successfully
recommended to the House of Commons a bill which had already been passed
by the Lords, repealing a number of penal acts affecting the Roman
Catholics, which, though they had long been practically obsolete, still
encumbered, and it may be said disgraced, the statute book, and were, so
to say, a standing degradation of and insult to the Roman Catholic body.
One of them, passed in the reign of William and Mary, still forbade any
Roman Catholic to come within ten miles of London, to have either sword
or pistol in his house, or to possess a horse worth more than five
pounds. Another, enacted under Elizabeth, still made every Roman
Catholic who omitted to take certain oaths guilty of high-treason,
though no attempt to administer those oaths had been made since the
Revolution. Another, of the time of Charles I., deprived any Roman
Catholic who should send his son to a foreign school of all protection
of the law; he could neither sue nor defend an action.
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