How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects?
Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan?
The system of Protestant control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was "well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth.

"Common sense," he said, "and common justice dictate ...

some sort of compensation to a people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them.

"No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.
There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India.

Research may well have shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there maintained.