1821. Aug. 6.

Rid Yourselves

Lett 2. Interests concerned.

employment thus given to riches.

The greater the share a man has, in this mass of the objects of general desire,

without labour, the less is the inducement he has to bestow labour: to bestow it in

the rendering of useful service, or any service, in that

shape or any other.

In principle, the applying riches, in seducing the teachers of

religion from their professional duty, is no more

accordant with the Catholic than with the Protestant, edition of the religion of Jesus.

If riches in clerical hands, in masses as

large as those in which it is thus lodged in countries in which that religion is put

upon the Official Establishment, were necessary to Catholicism, four fifths of the population of Ireland, in number little less

than eight millions, would, though Catholics in all other respects, stand excommunicated: excommunicated for deficiency in opulence:

for the want of that qualification, which, by the founder of this same religion, was in the most pointed

manner, pronounced a cause of disqualifiaction - not to say of exclusion - from his

Church.

III. Public Creditors. While, to any individual belonging

to the class thus denominated, so much as a maravedi that

remains due,- remains unsatisfied - if any thing that, as above explained, could,

without prejudice to justice, be defalcated from the provision made in all shapes for

the two just-mentioned classes, remains unapplied to the satisfaction of this third

class, it seems not easy to say how the giving of any thing that continues to be

given to either of these two classes can be reconcilable to justice: and, when I say

due I mean due on whatever score - whether on the score

of money or moneys worth originally advanced, or on the score of intervening

interest. What is more - it seems not altogether easy to see how, even in respect of

that which has above been stated as due to those non-labouring or unserviceably

labouring functionaries on the score of fixt and authorised expectation, any thing more can be requisite on the score of justice, than

their being admitted to come in as creditors, and being

paid in the same times and proportions, as the Public Creditors so denominated. True

it is that, the greatest happiness of the greatest number being the all-comprehensive

and the only ultimate right and proper end - justice itself no more than a means with relation to that end, rather than that end should

be contravened, true it is - that, under the pressure of necessity, if it be a real and absolute not a mere nominal and

relative necessity, the demands of justice, as on other occasions so on this, may and ought to

 To the Translator Insert here a few of the most apt quotations from

the vulgate.