They would protect their religion as they did their property; and in order to attach them still more strongly, they shut up their places of worship--they proscribed and banished and hung their clergy--they hung or shot the unfortunate people who tied to worship God in the desert--in mountain fastnesses and in caves, and threw their dead bodies to find a tomb in the entrails of the birds of the air, or the dogs which even persecution had made mad with hunger.

But again--for this pleasing panorama is not yet closed, the happy Catholics, who must have danced with delight, under the privileges of such a Constitution, were deprived of the right to occupy and possess all civil offices--their enterprise was crushed--their industry made subservient to the rapacity of their enemies, and not to their own prosperity.

But this is far from being all.

The sources of knowledge--of knowledge which only can enlighten and civilize the mind, prevent crime, and promote the progress of human society--these sources of knowledge, I say, were sealed against them; they were consequently left to ignorance, and its inseparable associate--vice.

All those noble principles which result from education, and which lead youth into those moral footsteps in which they should tread, were made criminal in the Catholic to pursue, and impossible to attain; and having thus been reduced by ignorance to the perpetration of those crimes which it uniformly produces--the people were punished for that which oppressive laws had generated, and the ignorance which was forced upon them was turned into a penalty and a persecution.