June 14. 1834
Roman Catholic Emancipation — Duke of Wellington — Coronation Oath
The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act—carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was—was in effect a Surinam toad;—and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters’ admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute.
If you say there is nothing in the Romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial Protestant sovereign, cadit quæstio. For if that is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. Certainly, if the religion of the majority of the people be innocuous to the interests of the nation, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty—that property which is set apart for the nation’s use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. But when I say—for the nation’s use.—I mean the very reverse of what the Radicals mean. They would convert it to relieve taxation, which I call a private, personal, and perishable use. A nation’s uses are immortal.
How lamentable it is to hear the Duke of Wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the Coronation Oath only binds the King as the executive power—thereby making a Highgate oath of it. But the Duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the Emancipation Bill afford to his opponents. He is hampered by that affair.