If the political power of Ireland is to be a transfer from those who are of the State religion of the country to those who are not, there is nothing gained on the score of justice.

We hear also much of STIGMA; but this is not to be done away unless all offices, the Privy Council and the Chancellorship, be open to them; that is, unless we allow a man to be eligible to keep the King's conscience who has not his own in his keeping; unless we open the throne itself to men of this soul-degrading faith.
The condition of Ireland is indeed, and long has been, wretched.
Lamentable is it to acknowledge, that the mass of the people are so grossly uninformed, and from that cause subject to such delusions and passions, that they would destroy each other were it not for restraints put upon them by a power out of themselves.

This power it is that protracts their existence in a state for which otherwise the course of nature would provide a remedy by reducing their numbers through mutual destruction; so that English civilisation may fairly be said to have been the shield of Irish barbarism.

And now these swarms of degraded people, which could not have existed but through the neglect and misdirected power of the sister island, are by a withdrawing of that power to have their own way, and to be allowed to dictate to us.

A population, vicious in character as unnatural in immediate origin (for it has been called into birth by short-sighted landlords, set upon adding to the number of votes at their command, and by priests who for lucre's sake favour the increase of marriages), is held forth as constituting a claim to political power strong in proportion to its numbers, though in a sane view that claim is in an inverse ratio to them.