SPEECH

ON

SIR FRANCIS BURDETT'S MOTION,

(ADJOURNED DEBATE,)

MAY 9, 1828.

MR. SPEAKER,

WHEN, at one o'clock this morning, I proposed that the further discussion of this question should be postponed to the present time, I should, if I had consulted my own inclination only, have greatly preferred to solicit the attention of the House to the observations which at the time I was desirous of addressing to you. But, though I have always experienced the indulgence of the House, I felt, that, at such an hour, and after such a debate, I could not hope to receive, and certainly had no right to ask, their patience.

I did indeed desire, Sir, if I could have caught your notice, to rise immediately in answer to

the Honourable Baronet, the member for Westminster not from any presumptuous confidence in myself, but from a perfect conviction of the strength and justice of the cause which I support, a strength and justice which would sustain the weakest ad

vocate.

It is nò disparagement to that Honourable Baronet to say, that, on such a subject, even his ingenuity and talent could produce little new in fact or in illustration, nothing new in argument. His statement, indeed, on the present occasion, is founded on the same grounds as those on which he himself, as well as others, in former discussions, have rested the merits and the claims of their clients. After a slight and passing allusion to the natural rights and general demands of the Roman Catholics, the Honourable Baronet proceeded to argue in favour of the claims, on nearer and surer authorities; namely, on the specific conventions of the Treaty of Limerick, and the pledge assumed to have been given at the time of the Union with Ireland. He added an argument ad verecundiam on the different treatment which Roman Catholics receive from all the other Protestant States of Europe.

Sir, before entering into the question of the Treaty of Limerick, or the pledge at the Union, I will stop for one minute to notice the preliminary argument of the Honourable Baronet, not so much from any intrinsic value in it, not so much from any great value which it seemed to possess even in his own eyes, as from the importance which the Roman

Catholic petitioners are fond of attaching to it. That preliminary argument implies, that all men have an equal right to be called, according to their personal merits, to civil office; that no man ought to be in a worse condition than his neighbour, in respect to such eligibility; and that all disabilities, therefore, which fetter it, are an injury to the State, and a tyranny to the People. Sir, what may be the facts in other countries I will not stop to inquire, nor will I here discuss the general reasoning. The principle, as applied to England, I deny on the authority of all the analogies of our Constitution. Until there shall be no distinction of civil rights between the copyholder and the freeholder: until there shall be no inequality in political power, as electors, or as candidates, between the freeholder of 39s. a year, and the freeholder of 40s. ; between the freeholder of 2907. per annum and the freeholder of 3007.: [I say nothing of the anomalies of Scotland-I say nothing of the caste of the clergy, who are proscribed, very properly-but still proscribed as candidates for the House of Commons] -until there shall be no difference between the legal infancy of twenty years, and the legal manhood of twenty-one (a distinction as artificial as any of the others) until there shall be no inferiority in the alien-born and the native inhabitant of these countries, both paying the same taxes and liable to the same personal burthens: until, in the progress of universal suffrage, there shall be no difference between the political rights of rich and of boy

poor,

hood and age, of male and female, I shall not cease to maintain that the Constitution has never vested in any of the inhabitants of England, as inhabitants, any political power whatever, or even, in the abstract, any eligibility to power: and consequently that no men, and no class of men are entitled to demand here, as natural rights, any political power over their fellow-men; or, indeed, even the capacity of such power in this country. The whole is a question not of right but of expediency; and as such, may be decided, either way, without injustice'.

Dismissing with this sentence the argument of the rights of man, on which the Hon. Baronet, to do him justice, rested little of his case, and which I should scarcely have noticed at all, if it were not urged at great length by the Petitioners themselves, in most of their addresses to this House; I proceed to the examination of those positions, on which the Hon. Baronet has chiefly relied for main

'I compare not the degree of privation by which the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier Duke and Earl of England, is withheld from his seat in Parliament, with the privation by which a freeholder of 39s. a year is withheld from voting at a county election but I contend that the PRINCIPLE, however different the degree, IS THE SAME. The State has arbitrarily and artificially allotted its powers to age, to sex, to class, to fortune, and to opinions and the question is in every case one of mere expediency, whether more or less public safety, or public danger, will be ensured by retaining, or removing, any one of those distinctions.