"If I wished to convince an impartial Englishman of the policy of abolishing these [anti-Catholic] laws, I should bid him repair to the south of Ireland; to mix with the Catholic gentry; to converse with the Catholic peasantry...to see what a fierce and unsocial spirit bad laws engender, and how impossible it is to degrade a people, without at the same time demoralizing them too. But if this should fail to convince him...I should then tell him to go among the Protestants of the north. There he would see how noble and generous natures may be corrupted by the possession of undue and inordinate ascendancy; there he would see men, naturally kind and benevolent, brought up from their earliest infancy to hate the great majority of their countrymen, with all the bitterness which neighbourhood and consanguinity infuse into quarrels; and not satisfied with the disputes of the days in which they live, raking up the ashes of the dead for food to their angry passions; summoning the shades of departed centuries, to give a keener venom to the contests of the present age."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomPeople from LondonGovernment ministers of the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Speech in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (18 March 1829), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (1852), p. 98.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Temple%2C_3rd_Viscount_Palmerston
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Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (20 October 1784 - 18 October 1865) was a British statesman who served twice as Prime Minister in the mid-19th century. Popularly nicknamed "Pam", he was in government office almost continuously from 1807 until his death in 1865, beginning his parliamentary career as a Tory, switching to the Whigs in 1830, and concluding it as the first Prime Minister of the newly-formed Liberal Party from 1859.
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