Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/188

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180
To the Protestants of Scotland.
[Aug.

and encountered tortures and death rather than yield one step to their Popish enemy. They at length held the crown of Scotland to be forfeited by the arbitrary attempt, and tendered it to William and Mary, and ultimately assented to the succession of the house of Hanover, because they were Protestants, and on the unalterable condition of adherence to the Protestant faith. These Scottish Whigs were opposed by the Jacobites, who excited two rebellions against the Protestant house of Hanover. But the Whigs of Scotland remained true to their religion and liberties. The Whigs of Glasgow, then a small city, raised in 1745 two regiments to support the Protestant cause, and to resist the restoration of that ferocious Popish tyranny under which so many of their fathers had become martyrs.

New times arrived. The Papists of Ireland extorted from a weak administration, during the war with our colonies, the privilege of voting in the election of members of the Parliament of Ireland. Then came the union of the Parliaments of Britain and Ireland. The Popish priesthood of Ireland thereby obtained the power, by the votes of their superstitious followers, of electing at least forty, and perhaps a hundred members of the British House of Commons. Still Papists could not lawfully sit in that house; but the Romish priesthood sent delegates thither, elected to support their ambitious views, and they never ceased to urge their followers to insist for the repeal of that last safeguard of the royal title of the house of Hanover and of the Prostestant faith. To that urgency they obtained fatal aid. From whom and from whence did that aid proceed? Attend to the fact, for it is of deep importance.

A band of ambitious men in England (of whom I will have more to say hereafter) attempted to climb to supreme power by allying themselves with the Irish Papists, whereby their numbers in the House of Commons were enlarged. They pleaded for Papists—the slaves of a domineering priesthood and of Rome—as if they were freemen deprived of liberty on account of their piety. Under this pretext, Fox and others, while contending that political power ought to be given to Papists, impudently ventured to call themselves Whigs. While contending in favour of a sect that resists the liberty of the press, that dare not even trust their followers to read the Bible; and wherever they attain to power subdue all men by confiscation, tortures, and slaughter, into subserviency to their ambitious priesthood, these men—deriding the fidelity of George III. to his coronation oath—so far ventured to rely on the blindness and credulity of their countrymen, as to assume the name of Whigs. The thing at first must have seemed strange and foolish; but during forty years they continued in speeches, books, pamphlets, reviews, to plead the cause of Popery and to call themselves Whigs, thereby impeaching the title to his throne of our Protestant King (he not being the first in the hereditary line), and reproaching our fathers as criminal, because they refused to yield up their religion and liberties to the dominion of Rome. Strange as it will hereafter appear in history, the nation, with incredible gullibility, swallowed the delusion. The royal title to the throne was disregarded, and the sufferings which our fathers endured, and the noble strife in which they persisted, were forgotten by a new generation destitute of historical knowledge. Cold, indifferent, or infidel in religion—acquainted only with the literature of newspapers, reviews, and novel writers—many of the younger nobles and gentry learned, gradually, to take on trust the pretext that the Whigs of their day were the Whigs of 1688; and that the name of Whigs, assumed with such incredible effrontery by the supporters of Popery, was, in utter blindness, adopted as a symbol of brotherhood with these men by you, Protestants of Scotland! Absurdly saying you are Whigs you in multitudes united with the supporters of Popery as your allies. You paraded under and around their banners, imagining them friends of freedom while they were only greedy to handle public money; and for that price were willing to enter into alliance with Popery, and all the slavery and brutal ignorance by which its domination in every country has been attended.

Now that this truth is broadly stated, ye supporters of Popery in Scotland, call yourselves Whigs if you will, but presume no longer, with gross hypocrisy, to say that you are Protestants. You have also called yourselves Re-