1821 Feb. 21

Rid Yourselves

'.1. Prelim y

II Clergy

In regard to the secular Clergy, no other assumption can on this

occasion be proceeded upon, than that of the necessity of the demand for the services

of a member correspondent to that of th official situation at present in existence.

In the Catholic Church the offices possessed by them stand distinguishable into

Sacedotal and Episcopal. The necessity of the office itself being in each case

admitted, and the officers themselves thus preserved from the defalcating knife,

remain for a subject of proposable defalcation the amounts of the negative kinds, to

this, and masses of emolument in every other shape: and as to this matter, the case

of Ireland may afford an instructive example. Under all the hardships imposed by the

inhumanity and persecuting spirit of the English government has the Catholic

population since the Revolution for example diminished?- no: it has increased: it has

doubled. +

To the case of both these sections of the Clergy the same demand

/observation/ applies as to the case of the Royal family and their dependents, as to

the regard does to prevent possession and established expectancy. But as applied to

the whole of the Clergy retrenchment deserves facility from a particular circumstance

which has no place in that other case. This, as every body sees, is celibacy: a circumstance whereby that portion of the demand

for maintenance which regards wife and children stands defalcated.

Monastery[?] from this same mind greater than that for the Monastical

class

Suppose retrenchment applied to this class, if in any number of actual possessors,

expectants in established expectancy, remained uncompensated, inadequately

compensated, whatsoever that number, proportionable quantity of suffering - of

sensible evil - of the only real evil - would be produced. On the other hand, so long

as all were adequately compensated, the whole mass of property existing in such hands

might be applied to the exigencies of the whole nation, and yet no sensible evil - no

evil code - be produced.