The scheme for uniting the two countries by close commercial and military bonds thus signally failed, and it left a great deal of irritation and recrimination behind it. How, it was asked with much bitterness, can Ireland expect to be duly cared for in any treaty negotiation with Great Britain, when her only representatives in such a negotiation must be ministers appointed and instructed by the British Cabinet? The English Government appears to have acted with perfect honesty, and to have only modified its course under the pressure of overwhelming necessity, but its position in both countries was exceedingly embarrassing and somewhat humiliating. Orde, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, had brought forward the original propositions as the offer of the Government to Ireland. His supporters had represented them as certain to be carried in England, and on the strength of that assurance the Irish Parliament had voted 140,000 l. a year of additional taxation. Yet the English Government had soon been obliged to discard that principle of equality which was the essence of the original resolutions, and had returned them to Ireland so amplified and altered as to be scarcely recognisable. On the other hand, Pitt by the most strenuous efforts, and in the face of a storm of denunciation and unpopularity, had carried his commercial scheme through the Parliament of England, only to find it rejected in Ireland.

It is worthy of notice that the words ‘legislative union’ were at this time frequently pronounced in connection with the commercial propositions. The free trade which they would have secured to Ireland had only been granted to Scotland on the condition of a union. Wilberforce in the English House of Commons, and Lord Lansdowne in the English House of Lords, spoke of a legislative union as the best relation for the two countries, but pronounced it to be impracticable, as Ireland would never consent. Lord Sackville, on the other hand, argued strongly in favour both of the practicability and expediency of such a measure, and of its great superiority to a commercial treaty. Sydney, when reporting this speech to Rutland, spoke of a union as impracticable, ‘especially at a time when the Irish were but just in possession of their favourite object, an independent Legislature.’ 1 It is certain, however, that Rutland had some time previously expressed a strong opinion in favour of a legislative union, 2 and it was noticed that shortly after the rejection of the commercial propositions several pamphlets discussing that question were published.

No positive evils, however, appear to have followed from the rejection of the commercial propositions. Ireland as a distinct country continued to legislate independently for her commerce, and her Parliament did not show the faintest disposition to interfere with English commercial interests. The commercial treaty which Pitt negotiated with France in 1786 included Ireland, and it was vehemently opposed by the Whig party in England; but the address approving it was carried in Ireland without a division, and the resolutions for making the necessary alterations in Irish duties passed without the smallest difficulty. 1 A new Irish Navigation Act proposed by the Government and adopting almost the whole of the English Navigation Act of Charles II. was soon after carried with equal facility. 2 A few years later some resolutions were moved resenting the exclusion of Ireland from the Asiatic trade, but nothing was done, and as far as commercial matters were concerned, England had certainly no reason to distrust or complain of the Irish Parliament. In 1790 applications were made by persons engaged in the leather trade in England, to limit by high duties the export of bark from Great Britain to Ireland, in order to insure the ascendency on the Continent of the English leather trade over that of Ireland. Lord Westmorland, who was then Lord-Lieutenant, remonstrated against this measure, and his letter to the English Government contains the following remarkable passage. ‘Since the failure of the propositions for a commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Ireland, no restraint or duty has been laid upon British produce or manufacture to prejudice the sale in this country, or to grasp at any advantage to articles of Irish manufacture, nor has any incumbrance, by duty or otherwise, been laid on materials of manufacture in the raw or middle state, upon their exportation to Great Britain. At the same time in everything wherein this country could concur in strengthening and securing the navigation and commerce of the Empire, the Government has found the greatest readiness and facility. The utmost harmony subsists in the commerce of the two kingdoms, and nothing has arisen to disturb it or give occasion for discontent.’ 3

The commercial propositions of 1785 form the first of the two great differences between the English and Irish Parliaments. In the interval between their rejection and the dispute about the Regency, only a few incidents occurred to which it is necessary to refer.

The scandalous state of the administration of justice in the metropolis has been already adverted to, and in 1786 a Police Bill was introduced and carried by the Government, for the purpose of remedying it. Dublin was divided into four districts. The watchmen, who had hitherto been under the control of the several parishes, were reorganised and placed under three new paid commissioners of the peace, who were nominated by the Crown from among the Dublin magistrates, allowed to sit in Parliament, invested with large patronage and almost absolute power, and made practically responsible for the maintenance of order in the city. A new force of regular police—consisting, however, as yet, of only forty-four men—was created and placed under the commissioners. They were to see that the watchmen discharged their duties; they were also themselves to discharge ordinary police functions, and they had powers considerably beyond those of the old watchmen, of arresting suspicious persons and breaking into houses in search of criminals or stolen goods. Several rates were imposed for the purpose of supporting the new system, and there were many complicated police regulations of a less important character, which it is not necessary to describe. 1

A somewhat similar scheme had shortly before been proposed for London, but it at once aroused opposition, and it had been dropped on account of a strongly adverse petition from the City. 2 The Government in England recommended the scheme as being almost equally needed in both capitals, but more easy to carry in Dublin than in London. 3 It speedily, however, aroused great opposition. Its opponents complained that it imposed a large additional expense upon the City; that it was essentially a patronage Bill intended to strengthen the power of the Government in the Corporation of Dublin, and to add to the very large number of places tenable by members of Parliament; that it violated the charter of the City by transferring the regulation of Dublin from the Lord Mayor and Corporation to the Crown; that it laid the foundation of a new semi-military force which might prove very dangerous to liberty. The last argument when regarded in the light of modern experience will appear very futile, but apprehensions of this kind were long prevalent in England, and were often expressed in 1829, when Sir Robert Peel created a Metropolitan Police Force in London, placed under the control of two Government commissioners, and no longer dependent on parochial authority.

Grattan, while acknowledging that the old watchmen were thoroughly inefficient, and that a change in the machinery for enforcing the law was imperatively necessary, opposed strenuously the Government Bill. He believed that it was intended mainly to increase patronage, and that all the legitimate purposes of the measure could be attained without violating the charter or withdrawing its ancient privileges from the Corporation. It is difficult at this distance of time to pronounce with any confidence on the merits of the case. The dangers feared were no doubt exaggerated or chimerical, and the confidential correspondence of the Government seems to show that though they were not indifferent to the possibility of increasing their influence over the Dublin magistracy, they were at least animated by a genuine desire to repress lawlessness and crime. 1 It does not appear, however, that in this respect the police measure of 1786 had much effect. For a few months, it is true, there was some diminution of crime, but little more than a year had passed when petitions were presented by a great body of Dublin householders, asserting that the new police were as inefficient as the old watchmen, and that crime had fully regained its former level, while the expense of the police had trebled, and a great amount of purely corrupt expenditure had been incurred. 2

The Whiteboy outrages, directed chiefly against tithes, but often taking the form of combinations for regulating the price of labour and lands, and the dues of the priesthood, raged fiercely during the later months of 1786 in several counties in the South of Ireland, and were accompanied by all the atrocities I have already described. At the end of January 1787, Fitzgibbon moved that further provisions by statute were indispensably necessary to prevent tumultuous risings and assemblies, and more effectually to punish persons guilty of outrage, riot, illegal combinations, and administering and taking unlawful oaths. Only a single dissentient voice was heard, and soon after, a very stringent Crimes Bill was carried through the House of Commons by 192 votes to 30. Grattan fully and emphatically admitted the necessity of fresh coercive legislation, 1 though he desired to introduce some slight mitigations into the Government Bill, and would have gladly confined its operation to the counties in which the outrages were taking place. On this point, however, he did not insist, but he strongly opposed and ultimately obtained the withdrawal of a clause in Fitzgibbon's scheme, which would probably have converted the Whiteboy movement into a religious war. It provided that if it were established by the evidence of a single witness that an illegal oath had been tendered in, or adjoining to, a popish chapel, that chapel should be at once destroyed, and its materials sold, and that if within the space of three years any new Catholic place of worship was erected in the same parish it also should be destroyed. 2

The Act, as it was carried, made all persons who administered illegal oaths liable to transportation for life, and all who took them without compulsion, to transportation for seven years; it made most forms of Whiteboy outrage, including the unlawful seizure of arms, levying contributions by force and intimidation, and even publishing notices tending to produce riots or unlawful combinations, capital offences, and it introduced into Ireland the provisions of the English Riot Act. This part of the measure excited considerable debate, and although Grattan acknowledged its necessity, 1 it was much opposed by several members, and especially by Forbes. He read to the House the well-known passage in which Blackstone described the English Riot Act as a vast acquisition of force to the Crown, and he then enumerated the many English Acts passed since the Revolution to restrain undue influence—the Bill of Rights, the Act for excluding pensioners and placemen from the House of Commons, the Act for limiting the civil list, the Nullum Tempus Act, the Acts for preventing revenue officers from voting at elections, for excluding contractors from the House of Commons, and for limiting the amount of the pension list. ‘He observed that not one of those laws was to be found in the Irish Statute-book, and asked whether members could reconcile it with their duty to give this vast acquisition of force to the Crown, without enacting at the same time those laws which the wisdom of the Legislature of England had provided against its abuse and encroachments.’ 2 The measure, however, at last passed with little dissent, though Fitzgibbon, at the suggestion of Grattan, consented to limit its operation to three years. 3

The Whiteboy Act of 1787 is another of the many examples of the prompt and energetic manner in which the Irish Parliament never hesitated to deal with epidemics of outrage. Fitzgibbon complained, however, that much of the evil was due to the supineness and sometimes even to the connivance of magistrates, and he alleged that they were prone on the slightest occasion to call for military assistance. An important Act ‘for the better execution of the law’ was carried in this year, for reforming the magistracy and establishing throughout the country a constabulary appointed by the grand juries but under the direction of peace officers appointed by the Crown. 4

But while Grattan warmly supported the Government in measures for the suppression of disorder and crime, he maintained that it was equally imperative for the Parliament to deal with those great evils from which Irish crime principally sprang. The enormous absurdity, injustice, and inequality of the Irish tithe system has been explained in a former chapter, and tithes and the tithe proctor were the chief cause of the Whiteboy disturbances which were spreading every kind of evil and disaster over a great part of Ireland. Pitt with the instinct of a true statesman had expressed his wish, as early as 1786, that tithes in Ireland should be commuted into a money rate, levied on the tenants of the parish, regulated by the price of corn and calculated on an average of several years. 1 But although many of the poorer clergy would have gladly accepted such a plan, and although in the opinion of Rutland the majority of the laity ‘were opposed to tithes and strong advocates for some settlement,’ the bishops ‘considered any settlement as a direct attack on their most ancient rights and as a commencement of the ruin of the Establishment;’ 2 and the Irish Government, discarding the advice of Pitt, obstinately resisted every attempt to modify the offensive system. Grattan had mastered the subject in its minutest details, and in 1787, in 1788, and in 1789 he brought it forward in speeches which were among the greatest he ever delivered, suggesting as alternative and slightly varying plans to pay the clergy a sum calculated on the average of several years and raised by applotment like other county charges; to institute a general modus in lieu of tithes; to make a commutation by a general survey of every county, allowing a specified sum for every acre in tillage, and making the whole county security for the clergymen. These plans were in principle very similar to the suggestion of Pitt, and in addition to their other advantages they might have made the collection of tithes by the resident clergy so simple and easy that the whole race of tithe farmers and proctors would have gradually disappeared. Grattan also proposed that lands which had been barren should for a certain time after their reclamation be exempt from tithes; that the partial or complete exemption of potatoes and linen, which existed in some parts of the kingdom, should be extended to the whole; and that a moderate tax should be imposed on the non-residence of the clergy. 3 The exemption of barren lands from tithes was approved of by Fitzgibbon, 1 and although it was for some years rejected on account of the opposition of the clergy, it was ultimately carried. But the other proposals of Grattan were met by an obstinate resistance. Fitzgibbon and the majority which he led, refused even to grant a committee to investigate the subject, and the Irish tithe system continued to be the chief source of Irish crime till the Commutation Act of Lord John Russell in 1838.

The persistent refusal of the Irish Parliament to rectify or mitigate this class of abuses appears to me the gravest of all the many reproaches that may be brought against it. Although about seven-eighths of the nation dissented from the established religion, the general principle of a Protestant establishment had as yet very few enemies; but the existing tithe system was detested both by the Catholics and the Protestant Dissenters, and it was exceedingly unpopular among the smaller landed gentry. Its inequalities and injustices were too glaring for any plausible defence, and the language of Pitt seems to show that England would have placed no obstacle in the way of redress. How possible it was to cure the evil without destroying the Establishment was abundantly shown by the Act of 1838. That Act, which commuted tithes into a land tax paid by the landlord with a deduction of twenty-five per cent. for the cost of collection, is probably the most successful remedial measure in all Irish history. It proved a great benefit to the Protestant clergy, and it at the same time completely staunched an old source of disorder and crime, and effected a profound and immediate change in the feelings of men. Very few political measures have ever effected so much good without producing any countervailing evil. The Irish Church when it was supported by tithes was the most unpopular ecclesiastical establishment in Europe, and it kept the country in a condition verging on civil war. After the commutation of tithes nearly all active hostility to it disappeared. The Church question speedily became indifferent to the great mass of the people; the Protestant clergy were a beneficent and usually a popular element in Irish society, and the measure which finally disendowed them was much more due to the exigencies of English party politics than to any genuine pressure of Irish opinion. But no such measure as that of 1838 could be carried in the Irish Parliament, and in the last ten years of its existence even Grattan desisted from efforts which were manifestly hopeless. Yet at no time had the question been more important. Resistance to the exaction of tithes was year by year strengthening habits of outrage and lawless combination, and in the hope of abolishing the tithes the Irish Jacobins found the best means of acting upon the passions of the nation.

But whatever social or agrarian disturbances may have existed in the remoter counties, the political condition of Ireland in the closing period of the administration of Rutland presented an aspect of almost absolute calm. Prosperity was advancing with rapid strides. The credit of the nation was reestablished. Both the young Viceroy and his beautiful Duchess were extremely popular. A gay, brilliant, and dissipated court drew men of many opinions within its circle or its influence, and political tension had almost wholly ceased. Forbes, it is true, and the little group of independent members whom he represented, brought in motion after motion, condemning the increasing pension list, and the multiplication of places; but they were easily defeated in Parliament, and they were supported by no strong opinion beyond its walls. The distress which had formerly stimulated discontent was no longer acute. The annual deficit had disappeared. Financial measures, which will be hereafter related, lightened the burden of debt, and an extensive system of education was promised. The confidential letters of Rutland and of his secretary in the latter period of the administration, form a curious contrast to the anxious and agitated letters that issued from the Castle during the administrations of Buckinghamshire, Carlisle, Portland, and Temple. Thus in February 1786, Rutland in a letter largely devoted to a description of the outrages of the Whiteboys in Munster says, ‘The state of this country, as far as regards the proceedings of Parliament, affords a prospect highly promising and satisfactory. The most important money Bills have passed the Commons without any material opposition, and scarcely a troubled wave appears upon the political surface.’ 1 A year later, when the Government introduced its very stringent coercive legislation for the suppression of the Whiteboys, the Parliament responded with an alacrity which at once surprised and delighted the Chief Secretary. ‘We have succeeded wonderfully,’ he wrote, ‘in our first measure, of amending the laws against riot and unlawful combination. It would not have been supposed possible even three years ago to have obtained almost unanimity in the House of Commons to pass a Bill of coercion upon the groundwork of the English Riot Act. … I am confident that this circumstance alone, as an indication of the determination of the Legislature to strengthen the hands of Executive Government, will go far to quiet the disturbance throughout the kingdom.’ 1 ‘I am highly ambitious,’ wrote Rutland, a few months later, ‘to see this nation prosper under the auspices of my administration of the King's Government; to find it of weight in the general scale, and become a source of strength to the Empire. A Riot Act, an optional police to be applied when it may be adjudged necessary, an extensive and well-considered system of education, which, I trust, will be carried into execution in the ensuing session, together with the adoption of the British Navigation Act, are measures of no inconsiderable moment and importance to the general welfare. The country for the present is for the most part free from commotion, except in the county of Cork, where some slight indications of discontent appear, but even these are merely partial and local.’ 2

On October 24, 1787, a short fever, accelerated, it is said, by convivial habits, carried off the Duke of Rutland in the thirty-fourth year of his age, and terminated a viceroyalty which had been singularly prosperous. Lord Temple, who had now become Marquis of Buckingham, succeeded him, and arrived in Dublin in December. His short viceroyalty in 1783 had given him some Irish experience, and it was thought that the fact that his wife was a Catholic might give him some popularity. With considerable business talents, however, the new Lord-Lieutenant was one of those men who in all the relations of life seldom fall to create friction and irritation. Great haughtiness, both of character and manner; extreme jealousy and proneness to take offence, had always characterised him; and before he had been many months in Ireland we find him threatening his resignation, bitterly offended with the King, angry and discontented with the Ministers in England, and very unpopular in Dublin. 1 He instituted with commendable energy inquiries into peculations of clerks and other subaltern officers of the Government, and succeeded in detecting much petty fraud which had been long practised with impunity; but corruption in the higher forms of government showed no tendency to diminish. Salaries were increased. At least one obsolete office was speedily revived. The measures of economy that were introduced into Parliament were strenuously resisted, and the first session of Parliament was abruptly and prematurely shortened. An Irish pension of 1,700 l. a year given to Orde, who had now retired from the office of Chief Secretary, and whose health was much broken, was attacked with reason as a violation of the assurance on the strength of which Parliament had consented a few years before to increase the salary of that office; and an appointment was soon after made which excited the strongest indignation.

I have mentioned the anxiety of all parties in Ireland to bring back to the country the great offices which were held by absentees. Rutland, shortly before his death, had tried to induce Pitt to make an arrangement for the restoration of the Vice-Treasurers to Ireland. It would, he said, be ‘an object of great utility to his Majesty's Irish Government, both as a measure calculated to fasten on popularity, and at the same time as uniting the more solid advantage of creating new objects for ambition of the first men and the most extensive connections in this country.’ 2 Pitt was unable or unwilling to consent, but shortly after the appointment of Buckingham the death of Rigby made it possible to bring back the important office of Master of the Rolls. The office, however, was coveted by William Grenville, the brother of the Lord-Lieutenant, who was now President of the Board of Trade in England. His letters on the subject are curious, and far from edifying. 3 He found that part of the revenue which Rigby had received was derived from an illegal sale of places. He doubted whether the office could he legally granted for life, and whether the performance of certain duties might not be required, and for these and some other reasons he at last determined to relinquish it to the Duke of Leinster, but asked and obtained for himself the best Irish reversion—that of the office of Chief Remembrancer, which was held by Lord Clanbrassil. 1 An appointment so flagrantly improper completely discredited Buckingham at the outset of his administration, and it was well fitted to exasperate equally both the most selfish and the most disinterested of Irish politicians.

The unpopularity of the Lord-Lieutenant was, however, chiefly personal, and confined to a small court or political circle. The country continued perfectly quiet. The alarm which was felt in the closing months of 1787, when the complications in Holland made war with France extremely probable, did not create the smallest disturbance. Recruiting was actively and successfully carried on, and the regiments on the establishment were raised to their full strength. Although combinations against tithes continued and a measure granting compensation to defrauded clergymen was renewed, the new Secretary, Fitz-herbert, was able to write that the commotion in the South had ceased. 2 The credit of the country had never been better, and the chief votes of supply passed without a division. Lord Lifford, who had been Irish Chancellor since 1767, wrote to Buckingham in August 1788, that he had never in his long experience known Ireland so quiet. 3

It must be added that one other important question of patronage was pending. Lord Lifford was old and broken, and he desired to resign the seals. Although most of the judgeships were now given to Irishmen, no Irishman had yet been appointed Chancellor, but Fitzgibbon the Attorney-General strongly urged his claims. He went over to England to press them, but did not succeed in obtaining any promise from Pitt, and he appears to have somewhat irritated the not very patient Viceroy by his many letters on the subject. 1 The matter, however, was still unsettled when the great question of the Regency arose and suddenly changed the whole aspect of Irish politics.

This question, indeed, was well fitted to strain seriously the constitutional relations between the two countries. The King was incapacitated by madness. No provision had been made for carrying on the Government, and it remained to reconstruct and to determine the first estate in the realm. 2 The event was one absolutely unprovided for by law. There was no real precedent to guide the decision. It was only possible to argue the question from the general principles of the Constitution and from very distant and imperfect analogies, and the real influences which shaped and guided the arguments of lawyers and statesmen were of a party nature. The King was warmly attached to his present Ministers. The Prince of Wales was closely connected with the Whigs, and would probably transfer the reins of government to their hands.

I have already related at some length the discussions on the subject in England, but in order to make the Irish aspects of this important question perfectly clear, I must now ask the reader to excuse some considerable repetition.

Two opposing theories, as we have seen, confronted one another. Pitt maintained that during the lifetime of the King he and he only was on the throne, that as he was incapacitated by illness it devolved upon the other two branches of the Legislature to provide for the government of the country; that Parliament had a right to select the Regent, and to define and limit his powers, and that they should exercise this right in such a manner that the Sovereign on his recovery should find his power and patronage as little as possible impaired during his illness, and be able without difficulty to resume the full direction of affairs. Fox, on the other hand, maintained that the English monarchy being hereditary and not elective, and the eldest son of the King being of age, he had a right to enter into the full exercise of the royal power during the incapacity of his father, but that the two Houses of Parliament as the organs of the nation were alone entitled to pronounce when the Prince ought to take upon him this power.

As it was ultimately admitted by Pitt that the moral claim of the Prince of Wales to exercise the office of Regent was overwhelming, and by Fox that he could not assume this office without the sanction and invitation of the two Houses of Parliament, the real difference on this point between the two rivals lay within narrow limits. Both parties, again, agreed that the Regent should have full right of changing the Ministry and calling such statesman as he pleased to the helm. Fox considered such a right to be inherent to his position; Pitt contended that it should be conferred on him by legislation; but both statesmen admitted that he should have it. The essential question at issue was the question of limitations. Fox maintained that the condition of the King gave the Prince of Wales the right of exercising while Regent the full royal power. Pitt, on the other hand, maintaining that the temporary exercise of royal authority was essentially different from the possession of the throne, contended that Parliament, while granting such powers as were necessary for this temporary administration, should leave the custody of the royal person and the appointment of the royal household in the hands of the Queen, and should strictly limit the power of the Regent to grant peerages, offices in reversion and pensions, and to dispose of the real and personal property of the King.

On this point there was one serious difficulty to be encountered by Pitt from which the theory of Fox was exempt. If the Prince had an inherent right to assume the royal power in all its plenitude, it was a simple thing for the two Houses to carry an address inviting him to do so. But if limitations were to be imposed and a form of government was to be constructed, this could only be done by Act of Parliament, and no Act of Parliament could exist without the royal assent. Scott, however, who was then the chief law officer in England, devised a legal fiction for surmounting the difficulty. He maintained that a commission might be appointed by the two Houses for the purpose of keeping that Great Seal the impress of which was the formal expression of the King's assent; that this commission might be assumed to act as the representative and by the direction of the King, and that under this fictitious authority it might affix the Great Seal and give validity to the Regency Bill. Probably if no party motive had been aroused, and if Parliament had not determined in accordance with the general wishes of the people that it was desirable that the power of the Regent should be limited, such an expedient would have been rejected as equally ridiculous and illegal; but as there appeared to be no other way of limiting the Regency, the plan was adopted by large majorities in the English Parliament.

It is easy to see how perplexing the doctrine of Pitt must have been to the strenuous supporters of Irish parliamentary independence. Their fundamental doctrine was that the Crown alone was the link between the two countries, and that the British Parliament had no authority whatever over Ireland or the Irish Parliament; but they were now told that in consequence of the incapacity of the King, it was for the British Parliament to create the temporary sovereign whom they were to obey, and to define the powers which he was to exercise. The views of the independent party in Ireland naturally coincided with the doctrine of Fox as the one which was the most consistent with their own Constitution, and several other motives acted in the same direction. The administration of Lord Buckingham had become unpopular. The feeling of personal loyalty which was very strong in Ireland was shocked by the restrictions imposed by the English Minister on the heir to the crown. Some men were not insensible to the charm of asserting for Ireland the right to pursue a separate line of policy on a question of great constitutional importance, while many others thought they saw an approaching change in the source of patronage, and were eager to be among the first to win the favour of the coming ruler. It was generally believed that the King would be unable to resume the royal authority, and the chief borough interests, which had long been almost passive in the hands of the Ministers, began to gravitate rapidly towards the new planet which seemed mounting above the horizon. The great interests of Shannon, Leinster, Tyrone, and Drogheda passed speedily into opposition and at once changed the balance of power; and the experience and debating power of Ponsonby and Hely Hutchinson were soon found on the same side.

It would be idle to suppose that the great mass of placemen and nominees who had so long been the docile servants of administration were animated by any other than purely selfish motives; but no one who has studied the history of the time will attribute such motives to Grattan and Charlemont. The main reason for their conduct lies, I think, on the surface. The Whig doctrine of the Regency was, beyond all question, more in harmony with the Constitution of 1782 than the doctrine of the Government. There were, however, other considerations which influenced them. A strong political and personal sympathy had long attached them to the Whig leaders in England, and on the eve of the Regency debates, an assurance appears to have been given to Grattan that in the event of a Regency the Government in Ireland would be changed, and that the new Government would accept and carry through some of those measures of reform which Grattan had so long unsuccessfully advocated as indispensably necessary to put an end to the reign of corruption in Ireland, and to make the Irish Parliament a real reflex of the educated opinion of the nation. 1

The Irish Parliament was not sitting when the English Parliament began the discussions on the Regency question, and as the incapacity of the Sovereign caused much less embarrassment in Ireland than in England owing to the large powers possessed by the Lord-Lieutenant, it was especially unfortunate that the unexpected prolongation of the debates in England and the approaching expiration of some essential laws in Ireland, made it necessary to assemble the Irish Parliament before the question had been determined in England. At first the Lord-Lieutenant believed that he could secure a large majority for the English plan, and that only a small section of the Irish Parliament wished to proceed by address. 1 But gradually his confidence diminished, and the week before Parliament met, the Chief Secretary wrote to the Government in a strain of great and evident mortification. ‘The specific assurances of support,’ he said, ‘upon which alone I could form any opinion of the strength of the Government in Parliament, have in the course of the last three days been withdrawn in so many quarters where from every consideration I could least expect it, that I have very little hope to be able to stem on February 5 the address which will be moved by both Houses to his Royal Highness to take upon himself the Regency of this kingdom.’ 2 When Parliament met, it was at once seen that the most important of the great interests in both Houses, many men who were in high employment under the Crown, and also the popular party directed by Grattan were resolved to act at once. A motion to postpone the question till the English Parliament had decided on the Regent was rejected by 128 to 74. The plan of proceeding by Bill, which was proposed by the Government, was rejected; and after a long debate, and chiefly under the guidance of Grattan, both Houses of Parliament agreed to address the Prince of Wales to take upon himself ‘the government of this nation during the continuation of his Majesty's present indisposition, and no longer; and under the style and title of Prince Regent of Ireland, in the name and on the behalf of his Majesty, to exercise and administer, according to the laws and Constitution of this kingdom, all regal powers, jurisdiction, and prerogatives, to the Crown and Government thereof belonging.’

It is worthy of notice that in the Irish debates the question of limitations, which was so prominent in England, was thrown completely into the background. It was asserted by Grattan, and it was fully acknowledged on the part of the Government, that the restrictions which were necessary in England were immaterial in Ireland, and that there was no insuperable difficulty in the Regent exercising different degrees of power in the two countries. 1 The real question at issue was whether, under the peculiar circumstances of the Constitution of Ireland and the connection of the two crowns, the proper mode of investing the Prince of Wales with the Regency was by address or by Bill. Grattan and those who agreed with him in adopting the former alternative, argued, like the English Whigs, that it was impossible to legislate with only two estates of the realm, and that, therefore, the creation or recognition of a third estate was the indispensable precursor of every act of legislation. They treated the Commission appointed in England to guard the Great Seal and represent the royal person, as a pure phantom, and the Great Seal of England as of no importance except as authenticating and attesting the royal volition and assent. They urged that the English Parliament, in attempting to deal with the question in the way of legislation, and in inventing a fictitious royal assent, had been actuated by a desire to restrict the power of the Regent, and that this end was confessedly of no moment in Ireland. They acknowledged that the crowns of England and Ireland were indissolubly connected, but they utterly denied that an English Regent made by an English statute could have any authority in Ireland unless he was also made Regent by the Irish Parliament; and they accordingly contended that the proposed method of proceeding by a Bill which was to become an Act of Parliament by the assent of a Regent of Great Britain, elected by the British Parliament, and as yet unrecognised by the Irish Parliament, was directly opposed to the Constitution of 1782. Ireland was acknowledged to be independent of the British Parliament, and therefore, now that the supreme authority was eclipsed, the Irish Parliament, without reference to the proceedings, without waiting for the decision of the British Parliament, called upon the eldest son of the Sovereign, who had already declared his willingness to accept the Regency of Great Britain, 1 to assume the full power and prerogatives of the Crown in Ireland.

The address was copied from that of the two English Houses inviting William of Orange to take upon himself the conduct of affairs. ‘There are points,’ Grattan said, ‘in which the Revolution bears a near resemblance to the present period, as there are others in which it is not only different but opposite. The throne being full and the political power of the King existing, the power of the two Houses cannot be applied to that part of the monarchical condition; but the personal capacity of the King, or rather the personal exercise of the royal power, being deficient, the laws of the land not having in the ordinary course of law made provision for that deficiency, and one of the estates being incapable, it remains with the two others to administer the remedy by their own authority. The principle of your interference is established by the Revolution; the operation of that principle is limited by the contingency.’ In this case there was, at least, no dispute about persons. The same person was acknowledged to be the one possible Regent in both countries, and that person was the heir to the throne.

It is remarkable, however, that Grattan carefully abstained from committing himself to the unpopular doctrine of Fox that the Prince of Wales, when of full age, had such an inherent right to the exercise of the royal power, that the function of Parliament in the matter was a function not of choice, but of adjudication. This doctrine was considered by the English Whigs, and, as it appears to me, with good reason, logically essential to their case. Grattan carefully avoided any distinct statement on the question of right. He spoke only of ‘the irresistible claim’ of the Prince. He based his argument for proceeding by address, on the ground that this is the natural method of proceeding when the third estate is incapable of acting, and that the supposed necessity of imposing restrictions on the Regency, which induced the British Parliament to adopt a different course, did not exist in Ireland. He never distinctly denied the validity of the proceedings of the British Parliament. He denied only that a Regency Bill which passed the two Irish Houses could become a valid Irish law by the assent of a Regent whose authority was based upon an English statute, and who was still unrecognised by the Irish Parliament. Curran and Hutchinson, indeed, strongly and ably supported the full doctrine of Fox, but much of the language of Grattan bore more resemblance to that of Pitt; and he seems to have thought it possible to take an intermediate position between the two parties in England. ‘The method,’ he said, ‘whereby I propose these great assemblies shall supply this deficiency is—address. There are two ways of proceeding—one is by way of legislation, the other by address. When they proceed by way of legislation, it is on the supposition of a third estate in a capacity to act; but address is a mode exclusively their own, and complete without the interference of a third estate. It is that known parliamentary method by which the two Houses exercise those powers to which they are jointly competent. Therefore it is I submit to you the mode by address, as the most proper for supplying the present deficiency; and although the address shall on this occasion have all the force and operation of law, yet still that force and operation arise from the necessity of the case and are confined to it. … But as addresses of Parliament, though competent, in the event of such a deficiency, to create an efficient third estate, yet do not, and cannot with propriety, annex to their act the forms of law and stamp of legislation, it is thought advisable, after the acceptance of the Regency, that there should be an Act passed reciting the deficiency in the personal exercise of the royal power, and of his Royal Highness's acceptance of the Regency of this realm, at the instance and desire of the two Houses of the Irish Parliament; and further to declare and enact that he is and shall be Regent thereof during the continuance of his Majesty's present indisposition. The terms of the Act are to describe the powers of the Regent, and the power intended is the personal exercise of the full regal authority; and the reason why plentitude of the regal power is intended by the address, and afterwards by the Bill, is to be found in the nature of the prerogative, which was given not for the sake of the King but of the people. … We know of no political reason why the prerogatives in question should be destroyed, nor any personal reason why they should be suspended.’

Such were the arguments of Grattan. In opposition to them Fitzgibbon, in speeches of admirable subtlety and power, but now for the first time supported only by a small minority in Parliament, maintained the doctrine which had been accepted in England. A simple address of two Houses of Parliament could not possibly give the Prince of Wales the royal authority if he did not already by right possess it, and to assert that he did possess it was treason, for it was to assert that George III. was no longer on the throne. This argument was common to both countries, but there were others which applied especially to Ireland. The most powerful was derived from an Act which had been drawn up by Yelverton and carried in 1782, and which defined the manner in which the royal assent should be given in Ireland. The object of this Act was to put an end to the practice of altering Irish Bills in the Privy Council. It provided that all Irish Bills, after passing through the Irish Parliament, should be sent under the Great Seal of Ireland to England; that they should be returned without alteration to Ireland under the Great Seal of England, and that the Lord-Lieutenant should be then empowered to give them the royal assent. 1 No Irish Bill, therefore, could become law without the Great Seal of England, but the Irish Parliament had no control whatever over that seal, and could, therefore, take no steps in appointing a Regent until the British Parliament had definitely decided in whose hands that seal should be placed. No Regent appointed by the Irish Parliament could convert an Irish Bill into a law without this seal, which was for the present at the disposal of the British Parliament. ‘Were the King of England and Ireland,’ said Fitzgibbon, ‘to come here in person and to reside, he could not pass a Bill without its being first certified to his Regent in England, who must return it under the Great Seal of that kingdom before his Majesty could even in person assent to it.’ The Great Seal of England on Irish Bills is the bond of union and connection with England, and anyone who disputes its necessity, contradicts the direct letter of the law and weakens the essential security of the connection. Since the Constitution of 1782 the union of the supreme Executives of the two nations alone connects them, and whoever tampers with, impairs, or dissolves that union is preparing the way for separation. It is at least conceivable that the Prince of Wales might at the last moment decline the restricted Regency of England, and in that case the supreme executive powers of England and Ireland would be completely separated. ‘It is a wise maxim,’ said Fitzgibbon, ‘for this country always to concur with the Parliament of Great Britain, unless for very strong reasons indeed we are obliged to differ from it. … Constituted as it is, the Government of this country never can go on unless we follow Great Britain implicitly in all regulations of Imperial policy. The independence of your Parliament is your freedom; your dependence on the Crown of England is your security for that freedom; and gentlemen who profess themselves this night advocates for the independence of the Irish Crown are advocates for its separation from England.’ ‘The only security of your liberty is your connection with Great Britain, and gentlemen who risk breaking the connection must make up their minds to a union. God forbid that I should ever see that day; but if ever the day in which a separation shall be attempted may come, I shall not hesitate to embrace a union rather than a separation.’ ‘What, then, have we to do? As soon as we shall be certified that the Prince of Wales is invested with the authority of Regent in England, pass an Act to invest him with that authority in Ireland; send this Act to the Prince Regent in England; he will then have the command of the Great Seal of England, and will return our Act authenticated according to law. His Lord-Lieutenant may then, by his command, give the royal assent to it; and who shall say that it is not a law of the land?’

Such, as fully as I can state them, were the leading arguments advanced upon each side of the controversy. It is my own opinion that the constitutional importance of the question, its danger, and its significance were all grossly exaggerated by party spirit at the time, and have been not a little magnified by succeeding historians. It appears evident that the case was so new and unprecedented that no course could possibly have been taken without straining or violating some part of the Constitution. It was an illegal thing for the Irish Parliament under any possible circumstances to deny the necessity of the Great Seal of England for the validity of Irish Acts, and for the Parliament of either country to assume that George III. was no longer on the throne; but it was an act of at least equal violence to create by parliamentary action a fictitious royal assent, to frame during the monarch's incapacity a new Constitution fundamentally different from hereditary monarchy, and to make the exercise of monarchical functions subject to election. In the words of a great lawyer, ‘the phantom of a commission issued by an incapable King, to confer upon what the other branches of the Legislature had proposed, the outward semblance of a statute passed by all the three, was an outrage upon all constitutional principle, and, indeed, upon the common sense of mankind, yet more extravagant than the elective nature of the whole process.’ 1 The doctrine of Scott that the Great Seal makes the assent of the Crown complete in law, though the Sovereign may be incapable of giving any warrant for affixing it, was certainly far more inconsistent with the principles of monarchy than the doctrine of Grattan, that the essence of the consent of the Crown is the volition of the Sovereign, and that the Great Seal has no value except as attesting and authenticating it. The former doctrine might be extended not only to an infant or lunatic king, but to a king who was a prisoner in the hands of rebels. It virtually substituted a seal for a monarch, and it reduced the place of royalty in the Constitution to complete insignificance.

But if, putting aside the metaphysics of the Constitution, we judge the question on the grounds of political expediency, I cannot see that any real evil would have ensued if the Irish Parliament, under the very exceptional and embarrassing circumstances of the case, had delayed its proceedings till the English Parliament had finally and irrevocably determined the Regency of England. Such a course would probably have averted all serious difference between the two countries, prevented all danger of a separation of the Executives, and destroyed the force of nearly all the arguments which were directed against the Irish proceedings. The conduct of Grattan and Charlemont on this question appears to me to have shown an exaggerated sensitiveness about the Constitution, and an exaggerated jealousy of the English Parliament; and the feverish impatience with which Grattan pushed on the question, and insisted on the Irish Parliament committing itself before the British Parliament had completed its proceedings, seems to me the greatest political error of his life. It is always a dangerous thing in politics to push to its extreme limits logical reasoning drawn from the first principles of the Constitution, and it was truly said by Fox that a habit of speculating upon political systems was one of the great vices of Irish political thought. Much might be plausibly said in favour of the right of independent agency and option of the Irish Parliament on this important question, and on the principle of constitutional superiority which the Government plan would have recognised in the British Parliament; but it is probable that the wisest English statesmen, if they had been placed in the situation of Grattan, would have accepted some constitutional anomaly, rather than incur the great practical inconvenience of differing from England on an important Imperial question, and would have contented themselves with guarding by express resolutions against any dangerous inference that might be drawn from their act.

At the same time, while disagreeing from the course adopted by the Irish leaders, I am entirely unable to concur with those who have represented the action of the Irish Parliament as seriously endangering the connection. It is quite certain that none of the leading actors in Ireland were disloyal to that connection, and it appears to me to be absurd to suppose that a measure investing the acknowledged heir of the British throne with regal power in Ireland during the incapacity of his father, should have tended to produce a permanent separation of the two countries. It was constantly repeated that under the Constitution of 1782 the hereditary monarchy was the sole bond of union, but in the difference between the two Parliaments it was the Irish Parliament which most exalted the principle of heredity, which was most anxious to preserve the executive power unimpaired in its prerogatives, and which formed the most modest estimate of the capacity of Parliament. It was morally certain that the same Regent would preside over both countries, though with slightly different powers. It is probable that if the Regency had continued, a change of ministers would in both countries have soon placed the executive and legislative powers in harmony. In the worst case, either the death or the recovery of the King, or a turn in his illness which made his recovery hopeless, would have replaced the two nations in their former relation, and an express enactment might then have been easily made preventing the possible recurrence of a difficulty which was serious only because it was unprovided for by law.

The difference, however, was for a short time very acute. The address of Parliament to the Prince of Wales was presented to the Lord-Lieutenant for transmission, but Buckingham refused to lay before the Prince a document ‘purporting to invest his Royal Highness with the power to take upon him the government of this realm before he should be enabled by law to do so,’ and the Government in England strongly approved of the decision. They maintained, in the words of Sydney, ‘that his Royal Highness cannot lawfully take upon him the administration of any part of the King's authority or the government of any of his Majesty's dominions till he is enabled by an Act of Parliament so to do, and that no Act of the Irish Parliament for that or any other purpose can be passed except by the royal assent, given to it under the Great Seal of Great Britain; … that the importance of this principle is the more manifest in this particular case, as the violation of it has an evident tendency to dissolve the constitutional union of the Executive Government of the two kingdoms.’ 1 Both Houses, however, passed votes of censure on the Lord-Lieutenant. In order to secure that Parliament should be sitting during the continuation of the case, the chief supplies were only granted for two months, and the two Houses appointed six commissioners, including the Duke of Leinster and Lord Charlemont, to present the address. They went to England and discharged their task, but at this critical moment the recovery of the King put an end to the question that was pending. ‘I cannot attempt to describe to your lordship,’ wrote Buckingham, ‘the transport with which this communication has been received by all ranks of people, and, indeed, I should not do justice to the loyalty of this kingdom if I did not assure your lordship that they are truly grateful.’ He speaks, however, bitterly of the opposition he had found from some of the great families, and adds significantly that ‘such a combination ought to be broken,’ that ‘the aristocracy, which was broken under his Majesty's direction by Lord Townshend, will be again broken if it should be deemed necessary.’ 1

The episode was terminated. Most of the placemen and pensioners who had at first associated themselves in a bond against the Government, consented on a promise of amnesty to resume their places. Several, however, holding places valued at nearly 20,000l. a year were dismissed, and among the number were the Duke of Leinster and Ponsonby. 2 Corruption of the most wholesale description was again resorted to. Seven peers were created; nine others were promoted; several baronets were made; 13,000l. a year more was expended in pensions, and a crowd of new and often sinecure places were created. In a speech in the February of 1790, Grattan stated in Parliament that in the course of less than twelve months fourteen new parliamentary places and eight or nine parliamentary pensions had been created. 3 In the twenty years preceding 1790, the number of revived or new places and salaries created and held by members of Parliament was not less than forty, and in the House of Commons of 1790 no less than 108 members were either placemen or pensioners. 4 Lord Lifford, who had continued, at the wish of the Government, to hold the seals, 5 sent in his resignation, and died a few days later, and Fitzgibbon was rewarded for his recent services by the Chancellorship. He obtained it in spite of the opposition of Thurlow, who insisted that the post should still be reserved for Englishmen, and he was at once raised to the peerage as Baron Fitzgibbon. He was barely forty, but his great abilities both as lawyer and politician fully justified the appointment, and except where his furious personal antipathies and his ungovernable arrogance were called into action, he appears to have been an able, upright, and energetic judge. Buckingham warmly recommended him, describing him as an eminently ‘honourable and valuable servant of the Crown,’ whose ‘parliamentary and legal careers have been marked by the most earnest and scrupulous attachment to the laws and practices of Great Britain both in Parliament and at the bar,’ and by a wish to maintain that ‘subordination to her Government and councils which are essential to the existence of Ireland.’ ‘The death of his eldest brother,’ he continues, ‘put him in the possession of a very large and affluent property, but he did not quit his profession,’ and recalling the services of Fitzgibbon on the Regency question, the Viceroy expressed his belief that no Englishman would have ventured to take the part he did, and that as Chancellor, if such questions were renewed, he could do much more than an Englishman in the same position. 1 His influence was steadily employed in opposition to constitutional concession, and everything that could restrict corruption in the Irish Parliament was opposed. A place and pension Bill, and a Bill disfranchising revenue officers, were introduced and easily defeated, and all inquiries were refused that could lead to a detection of corruption.

Such were the last proceedings in the Irish Parliament, before the French Revolution burst upon Europe; and when we remember that the obstinate resistance to all attempts to reform and purify the House of Commons was coupled with an equally obstinate resistance to all attempts to modify the enormous grievance and injustice of the tithe system which pressed so heavily on the poor, it is easy to realise the fierce elements of combustion that were accumulating. Buckingham, however, did not remain to meet the storm. His health was broken and every vestige of popularity had gone. In April Fitzherbert resigned, and at the end of September Buckingham followed his example. On January 5, 1790, Lord Westmorland arrived in Dublin to succeed him.

One of the consequences of the conflict between the two Parliaments on the Regency question, and of the very exaggerated language that was used about the danger to the connection, was that Irish affairs now began to attract the serious attention of the French Government. Luzerne, the French ambassador in London, wrote two despatches in February 1789, in which he briefly mentioned the conflict and the growing reports that Ireland was tending more and more to separation from England, but expressed his own belief that such ideas can only have been adopted by a few wild enthusiasts, for Ireland was too weak to stand alone and was bound to England by irresistible commercial interests. A month later, however, the question seemed to him more serious, and he wrote a long and interesting despatch to his Government, relating in detail the Irish proceedings about the Regency. The conduct of the Irish Parliament seemed to him very unconstitutional. The claim it advanced went much beyond any it had before put forward, and tended directly to sunder the two Governments and crowns. It was greatly due to the personal unpopularity of the Lord-Lieutenant, who had shown himself at once haughty, harsh, and parsimonious, and in the bestowal of his patronage extremely corrupt. It was also, he thought, partly due to the fact ‘that among the principal personages of that kingdom there is a very strong party which has always contemplated a separation sooner or later of Ireland from Great Britain.’ ‘This state of things,’ he said, ‘assuredly deserves our attention, and although Ireland is, in my opinion, still far from separating from England, such an event may be foreseen, and it ought not to come upon us by surprise.’ He therefore strongly urged the French Foreign Office to send over a secret agent, and he designated the man who appeared to him most fitted for the task.

There was now in England an American merchant named Dr. Bancroft, a man of strong scientific tastes and an old and intimate friend of Franklin. In 1779, when there was a general belief in France, that Ireland was about to follow the example of America, and that an Irish insurrection might assist France in her war, this man had been sent over by Vergennes on a secret mission. He had carefully studied the condition of Ireland on the spot, and he had come to the conclusion that, though there were decided principles of independence among the Irish, they had no settled plan and were much divided, and that nothing could be expected from insurrection. It was the report of Bancroft, corroborated by other information, that decided Vergennes to have no further dealings with disaffected Irishmen. Bancroft had recently returned to England, where he had many friends and was much respected, and he was on very intimate terms with Lord Camden. Luzerne had the highest opinion of his judgment and integrity. He believed him to be fitted beyond all other men to ascertain for the French Government what changes had taken place during the last ten years in Irish affairs, and he knew that he was ready to undertake the mission.

The reply of the French Minister was very cautious. ‘I agree with you, sir,’ he wrote, ‘that the fermentation in Ireland may have serious consequences, and that whatever course the Ministry adopts, it is not likely to appease it; but I think at the same time that matters are not ripe for a mission, and that we must not in any way co-operate. Our secret would be assuredly discovered, and war would be the inevitable consequence of the slightest indiscretion. Moreover, sir, I have reason to believe that the hatred of the Irish for France is much stronger than their aversion to the English Government. This at least was the conclusion arrived at by Dr. Bancroft in the report which he drew up.’ At the same time, the Minister added, circumstances may have changed, and it will certainly be useful to France to know the real dispositions of the Irish. The proposition of Luzerne was therefore accepted. He was authorised to send over Bancroft to Ireland, furnishing him with money and with verbal instructions, and to obtain from him on his return a detailed report; but he must be careful in no way to commit the Government to any line of action, and he was to take the utmost precaution that the affair should not be known.

This was probably the first step of a series of French dealings with Ireland, which a few years later assumed a grave importance. ‘Perhaps,’ wrote Luzerne, ‘the condition of Ireland is the only great obstacle the Ministry is about to encounter in its views of ambition, and in the intrigues which it is designing on the Continent.’ 1

The period of history which has been recounted in this chapter, though in many ways chequered, was on the whole one of great and growing prosperity. From the time when commercial liberty was restored, till the outburst of the rebellion of 1798, we have decisive evidence that the material condition of Ireland was steadily improving, though she still ranked far behind England in capital, industrial skill, and industrial habits. One of the most important evidences that can be adduced of the character of a Government and of the true condition of a country, is to be found in the state of its public credit, and a careful examination of that of Ireland will furnish some conclusions which may, I think, be surprising to the reader. Shortly after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 the whole of the small debt which Ireland had incurred had been liquidated, but the Seven Years' War and the War of the American Revolution had created a new debt, and for some years after the last peace there were annual deficits. In January 1786 the Accountant-General observed that since the year 1760 the Irish national debt had increased from 223,000l. to 2,181,501l., but he added as a palliation, ‘that two very expensive companions had gone hand in hand with that debt—premiums and parliamentary grants, which amounted in the said number of years to 2,700,000l.’ 2 We have seen the strenuous efforts made by Grattan to put an end to the annual deficits; the resolution introduced at his desire into the commerical propositions for that purpose, and the additional duties that were imposed in 1785 and were estimated to produce 140,000l. a year. This measure proved perfectly efficacious in restoring the equilibrium, and until the great French War broke out, followed soon after by virulent disaffection and by a great rebellion in Ireland, Irish finances appear to have been thoroughly sound. Foster, who was by far the ablest finance minister Ireland has ever possessed, observed in one of his speeches on the Union that in 1785, when the new taxes were imposed, the national debt was 2,381, 501l. In 1793 at the end of the peace it was only 2,344,314l. 1

This fact, however, alone is not decisive. We have seen how lamentable the poverty of Ireland had been in early periods when the debt was very small. A nation may have no debt because it is unable to borrow, or it may restore the equilibrium of its finances by taxation which is ruinous to its prosperity. Nothing, however, is more certain than that for many years after the imposition of the new taxation, Irish wealth was rapidly augmenting. At the end of the session of 1787 Foster, who was then Speaker, when presenting the money bills to the Lord-Lieutenant for the royal assent, said ‘the wisdom of the principle which the Commons have established and persevered in under your grace's auspices, of preventing the further accumulation of national debt, is now powerfully felt throughout the kingdom in its many beneficial consequences. Public credit has gradually risen to a height unknown for many years. Agriculture has brought in new supplies of wealth, and the merchants and manufacturers are each encouraged to extend their efforts, by the security it has given them that no new taxes will obstruct the progress of their works or impede the success of their speculations.’ He added, however, some remarkable words referring to the stringent Whiteboy legislation of that year, which characterise truly the spirit in which at that time Irish affairs were administered. ‘Happy as our situation is, we know that all its blessings will be a vain expectation, if a spirit of outrage and opposition to the law shall prevent internal industry, and depreciate the national character. We have therefore applied ourselves to form such laws as must, under the firmness and the justice of your grace's Government, effectually and speedily suppress that lawless spirit.’ 2

I have quoted already, the letter of Rutland in March 1785, in which he complained that the result of nine or ten years of deficits had been that the Government 4 per cent. debentures, which had once been above par, had sunk to 88 per cent. 3 Immediately after the imposition of the new taxes, however, they rose, and in the beginning of 1787 Rutland was able to send over to Sydney a plan which he had accepted, for replacing 4 per cent. debentures of 200,000l. by debentures of 3 1/2 per cent.; and Treasury bills for 100,000l. bearing an interest of 3 d. per 100l. a day, by others bearing interest of 2 1/2 d., ‘a pleasing proof,’ as he justly said, ‘of the credit in which the funds of this country at present stand.’ 1 A year later, under the administration of Buckingham, and in spite of a considerable addition to the military forces, a similar process of reduction was extended to the whole of the remaining debt. ‘The Lord-Lieutenant,’ wrote the Chief Secretary on this occasion, ‘enjoys particular pleasure in reflecting that the state of public credit in Ireland is such that Government, while it attains an increase of effective force to Great Britain, can in the same instant bring forward a plan for the reduction of the interest upon the whole of the national debt.’ 2

These two reductions were not, it is true, carried out without a certain premium which was raised in the form of lotteries, 3 but the real price of the Government loans was stated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be 3l. 18s. percent.; 4 and speaking in 1788, at a time when the financial prosperity of the Ministry of Pitt was at its height, he was able to declare that ‘the public funds in this country have been higher here these several years past than what they are in England.’ 5 We have seen that about this time Pitt was looking forward confidently to the rapid diminution and not very distant extinction of the English National Debt. In Ireland the prevailing spirit was not less sanguine, and the best financiers connected with the Government avowed their belief that the finances of Ireland were now so satisfactorily established, that Ireland was never again likely to increase her debt. 6

The financial debates of this year are singularly instructive, both on account of the rare amount of knowledge and ability they displayed, and on account of the many incidental lights they throw on the condition of the country. In Ireland as in England, and indeed in all, or almost all, European countries except Holland, the rate of interest was settled by law, and the rate in Ireland was six per cent. while in England it was only five. The Irish rate of interest had been reduced in 1703 from ten to eight, in 1721 to seven, and in 1731 to six per cent., and it was now assimilated to the English rate. It was mentioned in the course of the debate that first-class mortgages on land could be had in England for four and a half per cent.; in Ireland for five per cent.

As early as 1768 the necessity for increased intercourse with England was recognised by the establishment of three additional packet boats between Holyhead and Dublin, thus securing six weekly mails between England and Ireland. 1 Travellers who visited Dublin towards 1780 remarked that a penny post had recently been established in the city; that new houses and public buildings were everywhere arising; that more than twenty stage coaches connected the metropolis with distant parts of Ireland. 2 ‘The roads,’ said one traveller, ‘are almost invariably excellent. The inns are furnished with every accommodation that a traveller not too fastidious can require. … Travelling is perfectly secure. … Footpads, robberies, and highwaymen are seldom heard of except in the vicinity of Dublin.’ 3 The splendour of the capital was indeed out of all proportion to the wealth of the country; 4 but it at the same time indicated clearly an increasing industrial activity. The old Custom House became so inadequate for the business which passed through it, that in 1781 the foundation was laid of a new Custom House of great architectural beauty, which was opened ten years later. In 1782, under the administration of Lord Carlisle, a National Bank with a capital of one million and a half was established in Dublin. A General Post Office, the Irish Academy, a College of Physicians, and a College of Surgeons speedily followed, and men of all parties and opinions recognised the rapid strides of national prosperity. Arthur Young, indeed, as early as 1778 maintained, in opposition to the best Irish opinion, that the country was even then in a progressive state, and had been steadily improving since the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748; 1 but after the concession of free trade the signs of advance were far more certain and unequivocal. In 1785 Lord Sheffield, in his well-known treatise on Irish trade, asserted that ‘perhaps the improvement of Ireland is as rapid as any country ever experienced,’ and that ‘the kingdom in general is in the most prosperous state.’ 2 In the debates on Orde's propositions Ireland was constantly, though no doubt very untruly, represented in England, as likely to become a most serious commercial rival. 3 In 1790 Sir John Parnell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, stated in Parliament that ‘it was his pride and his happiness to declare that he did not think it possible for any nation to have improved more in her circumstances since 1784 … than Ireland had done; from that time the debt of the nation had decreased 96,000l., and the interest on the debt still remaining had decreased 17,000l. per annum, which was precisely the same thing at four per cent. as if the principal had been reduced 425,000l. more. Add to this the great increase of trade, our exports alone having increased 800,000l. last year beyond the former period; and he believed it would be difficult in the history of the world to show a nation rising faster in prosperity.’ 4

In 1793 Crumpe published that remarkable ‘Essay on the best Means of providing Employment for the People,’ which is one of the most faithful, and at the same time most unflattering, pictures of the social and industrial condition of Ireland. But while tracing with an unsparing hand the great industrial failings of the people, he adds that ‘the defects which have been noticed are daily diminishing. The middling ranks are becoming ing more attentive to their debts and less indulgent to their extravagance. A spirit of industry is infusing its regenerating vigour among them; the vain and ridiculous aversion to the pursuits of commerce or other industrious occupations is wearing out, and the encouragement of agriculture more generally attended to. The lower classes are becoming more industrious, more wealthy, more independent. … The situation of the peasant has since the final pacification of the kingdom, but more especially since the settlement of its Constitution in 1782, been daily improving.’ 1 ‘I am bold to say,’ said Lord Clare, speaking of the preceding twenty years, in the remarkable speech which he delivered and published in 1798, ‘there is not a nation on the habitable globe which has advanced in cultivation and commerce, in agriculture and in manufactures, with the same rapidity in the same period.’ 2 Cooke, who was the chief official writer in favour of the Union, uses very similar language. ‘What is meant,’ he asked in a pamphlet which had great influence, ‘by a firm and steady administration? Does it mean such an administration as tends to the increase of the nation in population; its advancement in agriculture, in manufactures, in wealth, and prosperity? If that is intended, we have had the experience of it these twenty years; for it is universally admitted that no country in the world had made such rapid advances as Ireland has done in these respects.’ 3

Many similar passages might be adduced, but these will probably be deemed sufficient. Of the causes of this prosperity, two at least of the most important are sufficiently obvious, while others may give rise to considerable dispute. The abolition of the trade restrictions, by which Irish prosperity had been so long cramped and stunted, was at once followed by a great increase in nearly every branch of commerce, and especially in the Irish trade with the West Indies, 1 while the abolition of the more oppressive portions of the penal code brought back much capital which had been invested on the Continent, and caused Irish wealth, industry, and energy to flow freely in Irish channels. A few years of external and internal peace, light taxes, and good national credit followed, and enabled the country to profit largely by these new advantages. In the opinion, however, of the best Irish writers and politicians of the eighteenth century, very much was also due to the great impulse which was given to agriculture by the corn bounties of 1784, and to the large parliamentary grants for carrying out public works and for instituting and encouraging different forms of manufacture. Of the corn bounties and the extreme importance that was attached to them I have already spoken. Whatever may be thought of them, there is at least, I think, no question that the great corn trade which had arisen in the last sixteen years of the century was an important element of Irish wealth; and it was mentioned in Parliament that about three years after the bounties on exportation had been granted, the exports of corn already attained the annual value of 400,000l. 2

Large grants were also made for fisheries, canals, harbours, and other public works, and a system of bounties for encouraging particular manufactures was extensively pursued. This system is exceedingly alien to modern English notions; but in judging it, we must remember that it prevailed—though on a proportionately smaller scale—in England and in most other countries; that in Ireland it was originally a partial counterpoise or compensation for many unjust and artificial restrictions imposed on the different branches of native industry, and also that it was pursued in a country where the elements of spontaneous energy were incomparably weaker than in England. In my own opinion, English economical writers have usually generalised much too exclusively from the conditions of English life, and have greatly underrated the part which Government must play in industrial enterprises in countries where industry is still in its infancy; where capital has not been accumulated, and where industrial habits have not been formed. ‘The infancy of our manufactures and the poverty of our people,’ said Flood in one of his speeches in 1785, ‘has forced us into a variety of bounties and encouragements, in order to give some spring to the languor of the nation. The Linen Board, the Dublin Society, parliamentary donations, directly or indirectly are made use of for this purpose. Our linen, woollen, silk, cotton, glass manufactures; in a word, almost everything respecting manufactures or husbandry receives some encouragement.’ The writer whom I have already referred to as giving the fullest account of the economical condition of Ireland at this period, observes that ‘the bounties on manufactures from the year 1783 to 1789 inclusive amounted to 115,000l. The sums granted in aid of manufactures, charities, and public works in four years ended in 1788, amounted to 290,057l. besides the annual grants to the trustees of the linen manufactures which were greater than before, and to the Dublin Society, &c.;’ and he expresses his own opinion that these bounties, but more especially the bounty on the exportation of corn, had ‘operated powerfully in rescuing Ireland from the state of poverty into which she had fallen.’ He acknowledges that there was often much waste, jobbing, and dishonesty in the way in which they were applied; but adds that, while the public grants had considerably increased, such misapplications had in the latter days of the Irish Parliament undoubtedly diminished. 1

The corn trade and the linen trade stood at the head of Irish industries, and while the first had almost entirely arisen within the period we are examining, the latter had rapidly increased. In 1788 Foster observed that in the six preceding years the annual export of linen had risen from twenty to thirty millions of yards. 1 A number of other manufactures and industries were at the same time growing up. The silk manufacture underwent violent fluctuations, but it was stated in the Irish Parliament in 1784 that there were at that time no less than 1,400 silk looms at work in Dublin, employing 11,000 persons. 2 In a speech in 1785, Foster, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, stated in the Irish Parliament that formerly Ireland was accustomed annually to import new drapery to the amount of upwards of 300,000 yards, but that the importation had almost ceased, and the native manufacture had so developed that the exports of Irish drapery exceeded 650,000 yards a year. 3 The cotton manufacture was only introduced into Ireland after 1780, but in 1785 it was computed that it already employed nearly 30,000 people. In 1783, 4,000l. was granted by the Parliament for cotton machinery, and in the following year the Vice-Treasurer was directed to issue bills to the amount of 25,000l. to Captain Brooke for carrying that manufacture into the county of Kildare. His great manufacture at Prosperous in that county ultimately failed, but several other cotton manufactures were scattered over Ireland, and Irish printed cotton obtained a considerable reputation and is said to have been largely smuggled into England. 4 The glass manufacture, which had been crushed by the iniquitous English law of George II. forbidding the Irish to export their glass to any country whatever, revived with reviving liberty. Lord Sheffield noticed in 1785 that nine glass houses had suddenly arisen, and that large quantities of Irish glass were already exported to America. It was boasted that the glass made at Waterford fully equalled the best article of English manufacture. 5 A hat and a carpet manufacture existed on a small but an increasing scale; Irish gloves and tabbinets were widely sought for, even on the Continent, 6 and from 1790 to 1792 the wealth of the country was very materially increased by the foundation or great extension of breweries of ale and porter. Cork was the chief centre, and they were warmly encouraged by the Irish Parliament not only on economical, but also on moral grounds, as counteracting that excessive use of spirituous liquors which was the great bane of Ireland. Newenham mentions the curious fact that at the close of the eighteenth century, in the province of Munster, the use of malt liquors greatly exceeded that of spirits. 1

This picture of the condition of Ireland in the earlier years of its independent Parliament differs, I know, widely from an impression which is very general in England; but the more important facts on which I have formed my judgment have been fully stated, and those who desire to examine the subject in detail can easily follow the indications I have given. The true history of the Irish Parliament is not to be found in the fantastic pages of Barrington, and still less in the dishonest pictures of modern partisans. It is to be found in the excellent reports of its debates; in the Irish Statute-book, which contains the nett results of its work; in the volumes of those contemporary writers who have most fully examined the industrial and economical conditions of Ireland under its rule. The character of this body I have tried to draw with a steady and an impartial hand, both in its lights and in its shades, and I am conscious that the task is both a difficult and a thankless one, at a time when the whole subject is generally looked upon under the distorting influences of modern politics. To an historian of the eighteenth century, however, few things can be more grotesquely absurd than to suppose that the merits or demerits, the failure or the success, of the old Irish Parliament has any real bearing on modern schemes for reconstructing the government of Ireland on a revolutionary and Jacobin basis; entrusting the protection of property and the maintenance of law to some democratic assembly consisting mainly of Fenians and Land-leaguers, of paid agitators and of penniless adventurers. The parliamentary system of the eighteenth century might be represented in very different lights by its enemies and by its friends. Its enemies would describe it as essentially government carried on through the instrumentality of a corrupt oligarchy, of a large, compact body of members holding places and pensions at the pleasure of the Government, and removed by the system of rotten boroughs from all effectual popular control. Its friends would describe it as essentially the government of Ireland by the gentlemen of Ireland, and especially by its landlord class. Neither representation would be altogether true, but each contains a large measure of truth. The nature of the Irish constituencies and the presence in the House of Commons of a body of pensioners and placemen forming considerably more than a third of the whole assembly, and nearly half of its active members, gave the Government a power which, except under very rare and extraordinary circumstances, must, if fully exerted, have been overwhelming. The system of corruption was largely extended after the Regency controversy, and it produced evils that it is difficult to overrate. It enabled a small oligarchy to resist the most earnest and most legitimate demands of Irish opinion, and as Grattan vainly predicted it taught the people to look elsewhere for their representatives, and exposed them to the fatal contagion of the revolutionary spirit that was then circulating through Europe. On the other hand, the Irish Parliament was a body consisting very largely of independent country gentlemen, who on nearly all questions affecting the economical and industrial development of the country, had a powerful if not a decisive influence. The lines of party were but faintly drawn. Most questions were settled by mutual compromise or general concurrence, and it was in reality only in a small class of political questions that the corrupt power of Government seems to have been strained. The Irish House of Commons consisted mainly of the class of men who now form the Irish grand juries. It comprised the flower of the landlord class. It was essentially and pre-eminently the representative of the property of the country. It had all the instincts and the prejudices, but also all the qualities and the capacities, of an educated propertied class, and it brought great local knowledge and experience to its task. Most of its work was of that practical and unobtrusive character which leaves no trace in history. Several useful laws were made to rectify the scandalous abuses of Irish prisons; to improve the condition of insolvent debtors; to prevent burials in churches; to establish hospitals and infirmaries; to check different kinds of disorder as they arose; to make harbours and canals; to encourage local institutions and industries; and except during the conflict on the Regency question, the parliamentary machine had hitherto moved on with very little friction or disturbance.

Of the large amount of ability which it comprised there can be no reasonable question, and this ability was by no means confined to the independent section. Several very able men accepted the general system of government, as, on the whole, the best suited for the circumstances of the country. Ireland has seldom or never produced, in the province of politics, men of wider knowledge and more solid ability than John Foster and Hely Hutchinson, while Fitzgibbon, Langrishe, and Parnell were all men of much more than ordinary talents. All of these were during the greater part of their lives connected with the Government.

The system of government indeed, though corrupt, anomalous, and exposed to many dangers, was not one of those which are incompatible with a large measure of national prosperity. There were unfair monopolies of patronage; there was a pension list of rather more than 100.000 l. a year, a great part of which was grossly corrupt; there was a scandalous multiplication and a scandalous employment of sinecures; but these are not the kind of evils that seriously affect the material well-being of the great mass of the community. In spite of much corrupt expenditure the Government was a cheap one; 1 Ireland was among the most lightly taxed nations in Europe, and with the exception of the tithe system, which was unjust in the exemption of pasture, and which in some parts of the country fell with a most oppressive weight upon the poor, there was little to complain of in the apportionment of public burdens. In France, and over the greater part of the continent of Europe, the poor were at this time crushed by special and iniquitous taxation, from which the rich were exempt, and by an immense mass of feudal burdens and restrictions. There was nothing of this kind in later Irish legislation. The only direct tax which was paid by the poor was hearth money, at the rate of two shillings a hearth, and a few years before the Union, cabins with only one hearth were exempted. 1 There was, it is true, no legal provision, as in England, for the poor, but the evils of the English poor law were so great that this was rather an advantage than the reverse, and the Irish Parliament was accustomed to make large grants for the support of charitable institutions, and, in times of distress, even for the direct relief of the sufferers. All those portions of the penal code against Catholics which oppressed the poor in their religion or their industry had either been repealed or had become completely obsolete.

The real obstacles to material prosperity were now much more moral than political. They were to be found in vices of thought and character which, if the present book be truly written, are largely explicable by the past conditions of the nation, which had deepened and intensified through many disastrous centuries, but which seemed now at last to be slowly and partially diminishing. Recklessness, improvidence, a contempt for labour and economy, a low standard of public duty among the higher orders; idleness, turbulence, ignorance, drunkenness, and an extreme proneness to crimes of violence and combination among the poor; a want in all classes of seriousness, self-reliance, enterprise, and respect for law, were the real obstacles to Irish prosperity. Though a few branches of trade were still closed, the legislation of 1779 and of 1782, and the free admission which England had granted to Irish linen, furnished a field of enterprise which was more than adequate to the resources and industry of Ireland. Her position was essentially different from that of Scotland at the time when Scotland purchased the commercial freedom which was indispensable to her well-being, at the price of a legislative union, and in this difference we may find a clue to a great part of the difference in the subsequent history of the two nations.

Nor was it merely in material prosperity that the signs of improvement were visible. Intellectual activity in the last forty years of the eighteenth century perceptibly increased, and it was assuming more and more a national cast. The writings of Charles O'Connor, Ledwich, Vallancey, and Mervyn Archdall invested the earlier period of Irish history with a new interest, and the Irish Academy, which was incorporated in the beginning of 1786 under the presidency of Lord Charlemont, gave a great impulse to serious and unsectarian scholarship. I have already noticed the important contributions which were made to a better knowledge of the rebellion of 1641; and the ‘History of Ireland’ by Leland, one of the Fellows of Trinity College, which was published in 1773, though monotonous and colourless in style, and often superficial in research, acquired and still maintains the position of a standard work. Another Irish history, written in the form of letters and dedicated to Lord Charlemont, was published in 1783 by William Crawford, one of the chaplains of the volunteers. It has little historical value except where it relates contemporary events in Ulster, but like the later history of Gordon, it has a great interest to the student of Irish opinion, as showing with what a complete absence of religious prejudice and animosity, it was possible for an Irish clergyman, at the close of the eighteenth century, to describe the periods of Irish history in which religious passions had been most furiously aroused.

The decadence of sectarian bigotry was, indeed, one of the happiest features of the time. Ireland, like all other countries, experienced the intellectual influences which were everywhere lowering the theological temperature, and diminishing the prominence of dogma in religious teaching; and the new national interests which had arisen had done much to turn the thoughts and passions of men into secular channels. By far the most brilliant and popular writer on the Catholic side was Arthur O'Leary, but though his devotion to his creed was incontestable, it would be hardly possible to find a writer of his profession who exhibits its distinctive doctrines in a more subdued and attenuated form, and no one appears to have found anything strange or equivocal in the curiously characteristic sentence in which Grattan described his merits. ‘If I did not know him to be a Christian clergyman, I should suppose him by his writings to be a philosopher of the Augustan age.’ The case of Dean Kirwan is even more striking. This very remarkable man, whose powers of pulpit oratory seem to have been not inferior to those of Whitefield, and whose eloquence was coupled by Barrington with that of Curran and Sheridan, was a member of an old Catholic family in Galway. He was educated by the Jesuits at St. Omer, where he was accustomed to say ‘he had imbibed the noble ambition of benefiting mankind.’ He took priest's orders, became professor of natural and moral philosophy in the University of Louvain, and afterwards chaplain to the Neapolitan ambassador in London; but in 1787 he conformed to the Established Church in Dublin, and became by far the greatest of Irish preachers.

In the present century it is almost certain that a man who had passed through such a change would have made the differences between his former and his latter creed one of the chief subjects of his preaching; but Kirwan through his whole career resolutely refused to touch upon any points of controversy. He mainly justified his adhesion to the Established Church on the ground that it gave him a larger sphere for that practical usefulness which he conceived to be the highest aim of a Christian minister, and he made it his special mission to allay religious animosity, to preach the tenets of a pure and perfectly unsectarian morality, and especially to plead the cause of the suffering and of the poor. 1 Extempore preaching at the time when he appeared was very rare in the Irish Church, 2 and the power which the passionate eloquence of Kirwan exercised over vast congregations is all the more wonderful because he never adopted any of those startling tenets which formed the staple of the Methodist preaching. The collections for the poor in his church arose at once to four or five times their usual amount. On one occasion 1,500 l. was collected for the Meath Hospital. Watches, jewels, and bracelets were often flung in fits of uncontrollable enthusiasm into the plate. It was found necessary to protect the entrance of the churches where he preached from the overwhelming throng, by guards and palisades, and the governors of all the day schools in Dublin agreed in a resolution expressive of the great national advantages that had arisen from the charity which he evoked, and calling on the vestries ‘to consider the most effectual method to secure to this city an instrument under Providence of so much public benefit.’

His character seems to have been at once singularly pure, disinterested, and benevolent, and his warm friendship with Grattan and his firm attachment to Whig principles for a long time shut him out from the favours of the Government. Four hundred pounds a year was the highest ecclesiastical income he possessed till 1800, when Lord Cornwallis bestowed on him the small Deanery of Killala, though he had been recognised for thirteen years as incomparably the foremost man in the Irish Church. It was not for such men or for such services that the overgrown prizes of that Church were reserved, and Lord Westmorland in offering him a small living of about 200 l. a year wrote very frankly: ‘It is far, far below your merits; but Government must reserve its high rewards for the services of its friends.’ Grattan in 1792 paid a noble tribute in Parliament to the great preacher. ‘This man,’ he said, ‘preferred our country and our religion, and brought to both genius superior to what he found in either. He called forth the latent virtue of the human heart and taught men to discover in themselves a mine of charity of which the proprietors had been unconscious. In feeding the lamp of charity he has almost exhausted the lamp of life. He came to interrupt the repose of the pulpit, and shakes one world with the thunder of the other. The preacher's desk becomes the throne of light. Around him a train, not such as crouch and swagger at the levée of princes, not such as attend the procession of the Viceroy, horse, foot, and dragoons, but that wherewith a great genius peoples his own state—charity in ecstasy and vice in humiliation—vanity, arrogance, and saucy empty pride appalled by the rebuke of the preacher, and cheated for a moment of their native improbity and insolence. What reward? St. Nicholas within or St. Nicholas without. The curse of Swift is upon him, to have been born an Irishman and a man of genius and to have used it for the good of his country.’ 1

A career like that of Kirwan would have been scarcely possible in Ireland in the theological atmosphere of the succeeding generation, and the liberality both of O'Leary and of Kirwan has appeared to their clerical biographers to be a matter requiring not a little apology. It is related of Law, who was appointed Bishop of Killala in 1787, that finding the population of his diocese almost exclusively Catholic, he distributed among them some of the best works of their own divines, declaring that as he could not make them good Protestants he would at least try to make them good Roman Catholics. 2 The undoubted fact that the most active advocates for giving votes to Catholics were found at Belfast, and belonged to those dissenting bodies which were theologically most opposed to Catholicism, is a clear proof that politics had begun to dominate over theology. The volunteers in the latter part of their career, without hesitation or concealment, enrolled Catholics in their ranks, 3 and the party which desired to concede to them political power continued to increase. ‘The right of being elected,’ wrote Lord Sheffield in 1785, ‘would surely follow their being eligible, but at all events the power would be in the electors. It is curious to observe one-fifth or perhaps one-sixth of a nation in possession of the power and property of the country, eager to communicate that power to the remaining four-fifths, which in effect entirely transfer it from themselves.’ 1

It would, however, be easy to exaggerate the extent of the change. The elements of turbulence in the country were very numerous, and little provocation was needed to fan them into a flame. The contests between the Peep o’ Day Boys and the Defenders in Ulster are said to have originated in a private quarrel unconnected with religion, but they speedily assumed the character of a religious war. The former, who were exclusively Protestants and mainly Presbyterians, professed a determination to enforce the law disarming Papists, and they were accustomed to enter their cottages in early morning to search for and to seize arms. The Defenders were exclusively Catholics, and were professedly, as their name imports, a purely defensive body. In truth, however, both sides were animated by a furious hatred, and both sides committed many acts of violence and aggression. The disturbances appear to have begun in 1785, but they continued for several years, and the Peep-o'-Days ultimately merged into Orangemen, and the Defenders into United Irishmen. Bodies of several hundreds of men of the lowest class on more than one occasion came into collision: several lives were lost; a reign of terror prevailed in large districts of Ulster, and it led to a new enrolment of Protestant volunteers to maintain the peace. 2 In Munster the Whiteboy outrages were certainly not of a religious origin, but they were directed mainly, though not exclusively, against the payment of tithes, and they appear to have been not unfrequently organised in Catholic chapels.

As the party strengthened which demanded Catholic emancipation, the rival interests and animosities were called more prominently into the conflict, but the motives in action were usually much more political than theological. The effects of a great transfer of political influence; the insecurity it would give to property which rested largely on the Act of Settlement; the danger of calling into power masses of utterly ignorant men, were the topics chiefly dilated upon. National education had not yet been undertaken by the Parliaments either of England or Ireland as a serious duty, and the Charter Schools, which were still liberally supported, scarcely cast a perceptible ray of light on the dense mass of Catholic ignorance. In Trinity College, it is true, Catholics of the higher and middle orders were already admitted by connivance, though they could not yet obtain degrees or honours, 1 but there was no provision for the poor. The endowments of the great schools could be of no use to them. The parochial schools which in England did something for popular education, were the products of a wealthy establishment, and no such schools existed or could exist among the Irish Catholics. For generations their education had been proscribed by law, and when the laws were repealed, the poverty of priests and people, the absence of educational institutions and endowments, and the habits contracted during the penal laws were insuperable obstacles. The great mass of the Irish Catholics were either absolutely illiterate, or were left to the slight, uncertain, and often perverting teaching of the hedge schoolmaster. 2

In 1787, indeed, an extremely comprehensive system of national education was introduced, in the form of resolutions, into the Irish Parliament by Orde, the Chief Secretary of the Duke of Rutland. He proposed to revive the schools in every parish which had been enjoined by a long obsolete statute of Henry VIII.; to establish four large schools of a higher kind, imitated from the Bluecoat School in Dublin and Christ's Hospital in London, and two others especially charged with preparing boys for the University; to reform the diocesan schools, and ultimately to found a second University, and to levy from different sources considerable sums in support of these institutions. 3 With the exception of the resolution relating to the establishment of a new University, which was opposed by a single member, the resolutions introduced by Orde passed unanimously through the House of Commons. 1 But no step was taken for carrying them into effect. The death of the Duke of Rutland, in October 1787, led to the recall of Orde, and his project, which was certainly not among the least memorable incidents in Irish parliamentary history, has been scarcely noticed by Irish historians.

Legislation on such subjects occupies but a small place in the Statute-book either of England or Ireland during the eighteenth century. On the other hand, many forms of private industry were encouraged, and some real efforts were made to spread industry and order over those portions of the island which were still in a condition of almost absolute anarchy. In these tasks the Irish Parliament, with all its shortcomings, does not appear to me to have seriously failed. Nor was it from the presence and proceedings of this body that serious danger to the Empire was to be feared. It was rather from the formation beyond its walls of a great force of opinion and of agitation which it could neither represent nor control. The country was awakening to a keen consciousness of its political existence; and it was inevitable, if the peace of Ireland was to be maintained, that something should be done to make the Irish Parliament a really representative body, and to put an end to the system of monopoly and corruption which ran through every pore of the Irish Administration. Sooner or later this problem must have been inevitably faced; and the sudden impulse which the French Revolution had given to the democratic spirit in Europe forced it on, at a time when the system of corruption was at its height, and when the Irish Administration was in the hands of bitter enemies of reform. On the capital question of granting the suffrage to the Catholics, the Ministers in England, as we shall hereafter see, were in favour of concession, while the Administration in Ireland was bitterly opposed to it; and the result was a vacillation and division of policy in a critical and dangerous period, which led to consequences most fatal to the prosperity of Ireland.

The problem before the Irish Parliament would, under the most favourable circumstances, have been an extremely difficult one, and most analogies drawn from purely English experience, and especially from later English experience, only tend to mislead. The goodness of laws and political institutions is essentially relative, depending upon their adaptation to the character, circumstances, wants and traditions of the people for whom they are intended; and in all these respects, England and Ireland were wholly different. There is no greater delusion than to suppose that the same degree of popular government can be wisely accorded to nations in all stages of development, and that a country in a backward stage is really benefited by a servile imitation of the institutions of its more advanced neighbours. A country where the traditions of many peaceful centuries have knitted the various elements of national being into a happy unity, where there is no disaffection to the Crown or the Government, where the relations of classes are normal and healthy, where the influence of property is unbroken, and where those who are incapable of judging for themselves find natural leaders of character and intelligence everywhere at their head, can easily bear an amount of democracy which must bring utter ruin upon a country torn by sedition, religious animosities, and agrarian war, and in which all the natural ligatures of society have been weakened or disjointed. An amount of democracy which in one country leaves the main direction of affairs in the hands of property and intelligence, in another country virtually disfranchises both, and establishes a system of legalised plunder by transferring all controlling authority to an ignorant and excitable peasantry, guided and duped by demagogues, place-hunters, and knaves. A system of criminal law and of criminal procedure which is admirably adapted for a country where crime is nothing more than the outbreak of isolated bad passions, and where every man's hand is against the criminal, must fail to fulfil the first purposes of justice, if it is applied without modification to a country where large classes of crime are looked upon by great masses of the population as acts of war, where jurymen will acquit in the face of the clearest evidence, and where known criminals may live in security under the shelter of popular connivance or popular intimidation. In a rich country, in which many generations of uninterrupted prosperity have raised the industrial spirit to the highest point, in which energy and self-reliance are almost redundantly displayed, and in which the middle class is the strongest power in the State, nearly all industrial enterprises may be safely left to the unassisted action of private individuals. It is not so in a very poor country, where the middle class is small and feeble, and where a long train of depressing circumstances have reduced the industrial spirit to the lowest ebb. Perhaps, the worst consequence of the legislative union has been the tendency it produces to measure Irish legislation by English wants and experience, and to force Ireland into a plane of democracy for which all who have any real knowledge of its circumstances must know that it is wholly unfitted. Very different conditions require very different types of administration, and, in Ireland, the elements of self-government lie, and always have lain, within a higher plane and a more restricted circle than in England, and the relations of classes and the conditions of opinion are incomparably less favourable to popular institutions. A stronger and firmer executive, a more restricted suffrage, a greater concentration of power, a more constant intervention of Government both in the way of assistance and initiative, and in the way of restriction and control, is imporatively required.

These essential conditions of Irish politics do not appear to me to have been unrecognised by the statesmen of the Irish Parliament, but they had two great and difficult tasks to fulfil, and the permanence of the Irish Constitution depended mainly upon the question whether in the next few years these tasks could be successfully accomplished. It was necessary to withdraw the direction of affairs from a corrupt but intelligent aristocracy without throwing it into the hands of demagogues and rebels, and it was no less necessary to take some serious step to put an end to the vicious system of religious ascendency without destroying the healthy and indispensable ascendency of property and intelligence.

CHAPTER XXV.: ireland, 1790–1793.

It was hoped by the English Government that with the recall of the Marquis of Buckingham most of the unpopularity which attached to the system he had pursued would disappear, and the Earl of Westmorland came over with the object of carrying out that system without change. Contrary to the usual custom, Major Hobart, who had been Chief Secretary during the last six months of the Viceroyalty of Buckingham, continued to hold the same office under his successor, and there was no important change in the Administration. Parliament was summoned on January 21, 1790, and a short but very stormy session ensued. An Opposition, numbering about ninety members and led with great ability by Grattan and by George Ponsonby, vehemently arraigned the proceedings of the present Ministers under the late Viceroyalty. They complained of the great recent increase in the Pension List, in the number of places and salaries held by members of Parliament, and in the expense of collecting the revenue. They introduced without success a Place Bill, a Pension Bill, a Responsibility Bill, a Bill for disfranchising revenue officers modelled after the English legislation, and they raised a new and very serious question by accusing the late ministers of a systematic sale of peerages. Grattan, in the most explicit terms, charged them with having ‘not in one or two, but in many instances’ made corrupt agreements to recommend politicians for peerages, for money, which was to be employed in the purchase of seats in the House of Commons. Such an act, Grattan truly said, was an impeachable offence, and both he and Ponsonby pledged themselves in the most positive manner to adduce evidence before a committee which would lead to conviction. The House of Commons, however, at the invitation of the Government refused by 144 votes to 88 to grant a committee of inquiry, and Hobart refused to give any answer when challenged by Grattan, if the charge was unfounded, to declare on his honour that he did not believe such corrupt agreements to have taken place. Defeated in these efforts, the Opposition, shortly before the close of the session, placed some of the chief facts of their case on the journals of the House, in the form of an address to the King. It stated, among other things, that although civil pensions amounting to 14,000 l, a year had lapsed since the Lady Day of 1784, yet the Pension List was now 16,000 l. a year higher than at that date; that in the same space of time the expense of collecting the revenue had risen by 105,000 l. ; that no less than forty places or salaries held by members of Parliament had been created or revived within the last twenty years; that, exclusive of pensions, fourteen places and salaries had been created or revived, and distributed among members of Parliament during the last Viceroyalty in a single year, and that out of the 300 members who composed the Irish House of Commons, there were now 108 who were in receipt of salaries or pensions from the Crown. 1

Though the Opposition failed in shaking the majority of the Government, their speeches had much influence in the country, and as signs of discontent were rapidly approaching, Government thought it wise to hasten the election, and the Parliament was dissolved on April 8. The calculation was a just one, for on the whole the Ministry appear to have slightly increased their majority, though for the first time since the death of Lucas they were defeated in the City of Dublin, where Lord Henry Fitzgerald and Grattan triumphed over the Court candidates. Among the new members were Arthur O'Connor the United Irishman, and Barrington the historian of the Irish Parliament; and two young men who were born in the same year, and who were destined for a long period to co-operate in the foremost rank of English politics, now for the first time appeared in public life. Robert Stewart, after a severe contest against the Hillsborough interest, was elected in the popular interest; pledged to vote for a Place Bill, a Pension Bill, a disfranchisement of revenue officers, and a reform of that Parliament which a few years later, as Lord Castlereagh, he succeeded by the most lavish corruption in overthrowing. Arthur Wellesley, or, as the name was then spelt, Wesley, was already an aide-de-camp at the Castle, and he now took his seat as a supporter of the Government, and appears to have spoken for the first time in seconding an address to the King in January 1793. The new Parliament sat for a fortnight in July in order to pass a vote of credit for 200,000 l. for the apprehended war with Spain. The vote was carried unanimously, and with the warm approval of Grattan, who only urged that it should be strictly devoted to the military purposes for which it was intended. Parliament was then adjourned and did not sit till the following January.

The signs of combination, agitation, and discontent outside the walls of Parliament were becoming very formidable, and there was a growing conviction that nothing could be done without a real reform of Parliament, and that such a reform could only be achieved by a strong pressure of external opinion. In June 1789 a large number of the principal gentlemen in Ireland, including Charlemont, Grattan, and Ponsonby, formed themselves into a Whig Club for the purpose of maintaining in its integrity the Constitution of 1789; preserving to Ireland ‘in all time to come a Parliament of her own, residing within the realm and exclusively invested with all parliamentary privileges and powers,’ and endeavouring by all legal and constitutional means to check the extravagance of Government and its corrupt influence in the Legislature. Their object, as Grattan afterwards said, was ‘to obtain an internal reform in Parliament, in which they partly succeeded, and to prevent the Union, in which they failed.’ The new society was as far as possible from being revolutionary or democratic. Among its original members were an archbishop, a bishop, and twelve peers, and among them were the Duke of Leinster, and Lord Shannon the greatest borough owner of the kingdom. Whatever might be the opinion of its individual members, the club did not as a body demand either a reduction of the franchise or the abolition of nomination boroughs, or the enfranchisement of the Catholics. The measures it stated to be essential were a Place Bill, a Pension Bill, a Bill to repeal or modify the Dublin police, a disqualification of revenue officers, and a curtailment of the unnecessary offices which had recently been created, and distributed among members of Parliament.

The Whig Club was warmly eulogised by Burke; 1 and it would have been happy if the conduct of the reform question had rested in hands that were at once so responsible and so moderate. The formation of a powerful and connected party of moderate reformers, pledged to seek by all constitutional means the ends which have been stated, was of no small importance; but it was scarcely possible that in a country situated like Ireland, the democratic and levelling principles with which the French Revolution was now intoxicating the most ardent spirits throughout Europe should not have had an extraordinary power. Even in the House of Commons its influence was not wholly unfelt; and two speeches were delivered in the early session of 1790 which were so new and menacing in their tone, and so clearly indicative of the coming storm, that they may well arrest our attention. The speaker was Mr., afterwards Sir Lawrence, Parsons, and at a later period the second Earl of Rosse; and he was already rising rapidly to the front rank among the debaters in the House. Having noticed that since the last session no less than fourteen places had been made simply for the purpose of distributing among members of Parliament; and that this was ‘but a supplement to the most corrupt traffic of many old places, to the prostitute disposal of many pensions, and to the public and scandalous barter of the honours of the Crown, all recently perpetrated for the purpose of accomplishing a depraved influence over the members of this House,’ he asked, if ‘the country gentlemen of Ireland support such a system of flagrant and stupendous corruption, how do they think the people will receive them at the end of the session?’ ‘Boast,’ he continued, ‘of the prosperity of your country as you may, and after all I ask what is it but a secondary kingdom? An inferior member of a great Empire, without any movement or orbit of its own? The connection with England has its advantages and disadvantages. I grant that the advantages greatly preponderate, and that if we were well governed we should have every reason to be content. … But if we are satisfield with the humility of being but an appendage to another kingdom, we should take care to receive the principal compensation a State can bring: namely, a frugal dispensation of Government. We may pride ourselves that we are a great kingdom, but the fact is that we are scarcely known beyond the boundaries of our shores. Who out of Ireland ever hears of Ireland? What name have we among the nations of the earth? Who fears us? Who respects us? Where are our ambassadors? What treaties do we enter into? With what nation do we make peace or declare war? Are we not a mere cipher in all these, and are not these what give a nation consequence and fame? All these are sacrificed to the connection with England. … A suburb to England, we are sunk in her shade. True, we are an independent kingdom; we have an imperial crown distinct from England; but it is a metaphysical distinction, a mere sport for speculative men. … Who governs us? English Ministers, or rather the deputies of English Ministers, mere subalterns of office, who never dare to aspire to the dignity of any great sentiment of their own. … We are content, and only ask in return for honest and frugal Government. Is it just, is it wise, is it safe to deny it?’

‘It is asked why, after all the acquisitions of 1782, there should be discontent? To this I say, that when the country is well governed the people ought to be satisfied, but not before. If a people are ill governed, it signifies little whether they be so in consequence of corruption from abroad or depravity at home. … The acquisitions of 1782 freed this country from internal power but not from internal malversation. On the contrary, this country has been governed worse since then than ever it was before; and why? because of these very acquisitions. … It has been the object of English Ministers ever since to countervail what we obtained at that period, and substitute a surreptitious and clandestine influence for the open power which the English Legislature was then obliged to relinquish.’ ‘The people of this island are growing more enlightened every day, and will soon know and feel their power. Near four millions of people in a most defensible country ought, perhaps, to be courted, but ought certainly not to be insulted with the petty, pilfering, jobbing, corrupting tricks of every deputy of a deputy of an English Minister that is sent over here.’ ‘The people required the concessions which were made during the American War because they expected to be governed better in consequence of them. Do you think they will be satisfied to find that they are not? Those concessions on the part of the English Parliament I grant were as ample as they well could be, for they were everything short of separation. Let Ministers then beware of what conclusions they may teach the people, if they teach them this, that the attainment of everything short of separation will not attain for them good government.’ ‘Where, or when, or how, is all this to end? Is the Minister of England himself sure that he sees the end? Can he be sure that this system which has been forming for the coercion of Ireland, may not ultimately cause the dissolution of the Empire?’ 1

The elements of revolution were indeed abundantly provided, and two aspects of the French Revolution had a very special significance for Ireland. It proclaimed as its first principle the abolition of every kind of religious disqualification, and it swept away the whole system of tithes. 2 The triumph of the volunteers in 1782, though it had been used with great moderation, formed a very dangerous precedent of a Legislature overawed or influenced by military force; and the volunteers, though they had dwindled in numbers, and were now generally discountenanced by the better classes, were still a formidable body. In 1790, Charlemont found that the Derry army alone was at least 3,400 strong; 3 and two years later Lord Westmorland ascertained that the volunteer force possessed no less than forty-four cannon. The Presbyterianism of the North, and especially of Belfast, had long been inclined to republicanism. The population of Belfast, according to a paper drawn up by the Government, had increased between 1779 and 1791 from 8,549 to 18,820. A Northern Whig Club was speedily established there, in imitation of that at Dublin, but its timid or moderating counsels were not suited for the political temperature. Towards the close of 1790 the Irish Government sent information to England that a dangerous movement had begun among the volunteers at Belfast. Resolutions had been passed, and papers circulated, advocating the abolition of all tithes, or at least of all tithes paid by Protestant Dissenters and Catholics, as well as a searching reform of Parliament and of Administration; eulogising the ‘glorious spirit’ shown by the French in ‘adopting the wise system of Republican Government and abrogating the enormous power and abused influence’ of the clergy; inviting the Protestant Dissenters to support by all their influence the enfranchisement of the Catholics, and to co-operate with the Catholics in advocating parliamentary reform and the abolition of tithes. The volunteers were reminded that whatever constitutional progress Ireland had obtained had been due to them, and they were urged to make every effort at once to fill their ranks. 1

In July 1791 the anniversary of the French Revolution was celebrated at Belfast with great enthusiasm. All the volunteers of the neighbourhood attended. An address drawn up in a strain of the most fulsome admiration was sent to France. Democratic toasts were drunk, and speeches made eulogising Paine, Washington, and the French Revolution, and demanding an equal representation in Parliament, and the abolition of the remaining Popery laws. A resolution was shortly after drawn up by the first volunteer company, in favour of the abolition of religious disqualifications, and it was responded to by an address of thanks from some Catholic bodies. This was said to have been the first considerable sign of that union of the Presbyterians and Catholics which led to the formation of the United Irish Society. 2 Paine's ‘Rights of Man’ was about the same time widely distributed in the North, and it made many converts. His controversy with Burke ‘and the gigantic event which gave rise to it changed in an instant the politics of Ireland. … In a little time the French Revolution became the text of every man's political creed.’ 3 ‘The language and bent of the conduct of these Dissenters,’ wrote Westmorland in July, ‘is to unite with the Catholics, and their union would be very formidable. That union is not yet made, and I believe and hope it never could be.’ 1

In the September of the same year an extremely able pamphlet appeared under the signature of ‘A Northern Whig,’ urging the necessity of a reform of Parliament, and, as a means of attaining it, a close alliance between the Catholics and the Presbyterians. It was written by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a young Protestant lawyer of no small ability, but much more fitted by his daring, adventurous, and enthusiastic character, for military enterprise and for political conspiracy than for the disputes of the law courts. He had for a short time been connected with the Whig Club, but soon broke away from it, and was passionately imbued with the principles of French democracy. His pamphlet is especially remarkable for the clearness with which it sounded a note which now became common in Irish popular politics—unqualified hatred of the Irish Parliament, and profound contempt for the revolution of 1782. He described that revolution as ‘the most bungling, imperfect business that ever threw ridicule on a lofty epithet by assuming it unworthily.’ It doubled the value of the property of every borough owner in the kingdom, but it confessedly left three-fourths of the Irish people without even the semblance of political rights, and the remaining fourth completely helpless in the hands of an alien Government. As all the counties and considerable towns of Ireland combined only returned eighty-two members, the parliamentary direction rested wholly with the purchased borough members. All that had really been effected in 1782 was to increase the corrupt price by which the Government of Ireland was carried on. ‘Before 1782 England bound us by her edict. It was an odious and not very safe exertion of power, but it cost us nothing. Since 1782 we are bound by English influence acting through our own Parliament,’ and paid for out of our own resources. In England ‘the people suffer in theory by the unequal distribution of the elective franchise; but practically it is perhaps visionary to expect a Government that shall more carefully or steadily follow their real interests. No man can there be a Minister on any other terms.’ In Ireland, alone among European countries, the Government is not only un-national but anti-national, conducted by men whose first duty is to represent another nation, and by every method in their power to repress every Irish interest which could in the most distant way interfere with the commerce or policy or patronage of England. This is esteemed the measure of their skill and of their success, and it is always their chief recommendation to the favours of the Crown. How successfully they accomplished their task was sufficiently shown by the fact that the Irish Parliament, by its own law, excluded itself from a commerce with half the known world, in the interest of a monopolising English company, and had just voted a military expenditure of 200,000l. to secure the very commerce from which Ireland was for ever excluded. 1 Without a searching parliamentary reform the overwhelming stress of English influence in the Irish Legislature can never be resisted, and it is a wild dream to suppose that such a reform could be attained without the efforts of the whole nation. This was the error which ignominiously wrecked the Convention of 1783 in spite of the genius of Flood, and left Ireland struck with political paralysis at a time when the spirit of reform has descended on all other nations and when the most inveterate abuses are withering beneath its touch. As long as the Irish sects are at enmity with each other, it will be always easy for the Administration by playing on the fears of the Protestants and the hopes of the Catholics to defy them both. But if the whole body of the people demand a reform of Parliament, which will include the concession of the elective franchise to the Catholics, Ireland will then at last obtain an honest and an independent representation.

It was the main object of this pamphlet to prove that no serious danger would attend the enfranchisement of the Catholics, and that members of the two religions might sit side by side in an Irish Legislature as they did in the French National Assembly and in the American Congress. The last remnants of Jacobitism, he argued, had vanished with the extinction of the Stuarts. ‘The wealthy and moderate party of the Catholic persuasion with the whole Protestant interest would form a barrier against invasion of property’ if any party among the Catholics were mad and wicked enough to attempt it. A national provision for the education of the Catholic priests would remove ‘that which daily experience shows to be one of the heavy misfortunes of Ireland, that the consciences, the morals, and the religion of the bulk of the nation are in the hands of men of low birth, low feelings, low habits, and no education.’ The clouds of religious bigotry and intelerance were vanishing rapidly before the great light that had arisen in France. The Catholic gentry were fully fitted for the exercise of power, and considering the great disproportion of property and therefore of power in the hands of Protestants, even a reformed Parliament would consist mainly of Protestants. At the same time Tone added one passage which is not a little remarkable as coming from a writer who in the general type of his politics was an unqualified democrat. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘there be serious grounds for dreading a majority of Catholics, they may be removed in a very obvious mode. Extend the elective franchise to such Catholics only as have a freehold of ten pounds by the year, and on the other hand strike off the disgrace to our Constitution and our country, the wretched tribe of forty-shilling freeholders whom we see driven to their octennial market by their landlords, as much their property as the sheep or the bullocks which they brand with their names.’ 1

It is said that not less than ten thousand copies of this pamphlet were sold, and its teaching was rapidly diffused. The letters of Lord Westmorland show the activity with which papers of the same tenor were disseminated during the summer of 1791; and in October, Wolfe Tone founded at Belfast the first Society of United Irishmen. It consisted of thirty-six original members, and was intended to aim at ‘an equal representation of all the people of Ireland.’ It adopted as its first principles three resolutions asserting ‘that the weight of English influence in the government of this country is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland to maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties and the extension of our commerce; that the sole constitutional mode by which this influence can be opposed is by a complete and radical reform of the representation of the people in Parliament, and that no reform is just which doesnot include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.’ Very soon a branch of the Society was established at Dublin. Napper Tandy, who had long been working as a demagogue in the more obscure forms of Irish agitation, was the Secretary of the Dublin Society. A lawyer named Simon Butler, brother of Lord Mountgarret, was the chairman. A test was adopted which each member of the society subscribed, pledging him ‘in the presence of God’ to devote all his abilities and influence to the attainment of an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in Parliament, and as a means to this end, to forward a union and co-operation of Irishmen of all religious persuasions. In December, the Society issued a circular letter expounding its principles, and inviting the people of Ireland of all creeds to establish similar societies in every district; and in the beginning of the following year, a newspaper called ‘The Northern Star,’ which soon attained a great circulation and influence, was established at Belfast to advocate their views. Its editor was a woollen draper named Samuel Neilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and one of the most active original members of the United Society of Belfast.

The Society of United Irishmen was at first constituted for the simple purpose of forming a political union of Protestants and Catholics, and thus obtaining a liberal measure of parliamentary reform. In the remarkable memoir drawn up after the rebellion, by Thomas Emmet, McNevin, and Arthur O'Connor, which is the clearest and most succinct statement of the views of the originators, it is positively asserted that although from the beginning they clearly perceived ‘that the chief support of the borough interest in Ireland, was the weight of English influence,’ the question of separation was not at first so much as agitated among them, and that it was only after a considerable period that the conviction that parliamentary reform could not be attained without a revolution, led them, timidly and reluctantly, to republicanism; and the writers assert that even after a large proportion of the members had become republicans, they were convinced that the whole body would have stopped short at reform. It is probable that this statement is true with regard to a large proportion of the first leaders, but it is certain that there were some among them, who from the beginning were more than mere speculative republicans, and who clearly saw that revolution was the natural issue of their movement. Among these must be reckoned both Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy. The former has frankly acknowledged in his autobiography, that a desire to break the connection with England was one of his first objects, and that hatred of England was so deeply rooted in his nature that ‘it was rather an instinct than a principle.’ 1 The journal which he wrote at Belfast, at the time when he was engaged in founding the Society, shows that he was at that time speculating much on the possibility of Ireland subsisting independently of Great Britain, and on the prosperity she might in that case attain, and in a letter written by him some months earlier, he expressed this opinion most explicitly. ‘My unalterable opinion," he wrote,’ is that the bane of Irish prosperity is in the influence of England. I believe that influence will ever be extended while the connection between the countries continues. Nevertheless, as I know that opinion is for the present too hardy, though a very little time may establish it universally, I have not made it a part of the resolutions; I have only proposed to set up a reformed Parliament as a barrier against that mischief, which every honest man that will open his eyes must see in every instance overbears the interest of Ireland. I have not said one word that looks like a wish for separation, though I give it to you and your friends as my most decided opinion that such an event would be a regeneration to this country.’ 2

From the beginning of the French Revolution, Tandy is said to have carried on a correspondence with French agents or politicians, and the Belfast members of the Society appear to have been especially intoxicated by the French Revolution. In general, however, the Society differed from its predecessors rather in tendency than in principle. One of the points most prominent in the confidential correspondence of Tone is his great dislike to the Whig Club, and to the whole type of Whig politics: ‘They are not sincere friends to the popular cause, they dread the people as much as the Castle does.’ He described them as peddling with insufficient measures, and he desired above all things that the respect for the names of Charlemont and Grattan should be dismissed, and the conduct of the national movement placed in other and more energetic hands. 1

The opposition so strongly stated between the two types of policy was a very real one. Grattan was quite as earnest as Tone in advocating the enfranchisement of the Catholics and the reform of Parliament. He was quite as fully convinced that it should be the supreme end of every Irish patriot gradually to blend into a single body the descendants of the conquerors and of the conquered. But in every period of his career he maintained the necessity of the connection with England, and in times of danger and of war there was scarcely any sacrifice he was not prepared to make to support Imperial interests. He had nothing of the French and cosmopolitan sympathies of the English Whigs, and he always made it a vital principle of his Irish policy to discourage all hostility towards England. The spirit of the United Irishmen was from the beginning wholly different. They believed, in opposition to Grattan, that it was possible for Ireland to subsist and flourish as a separate State, and their attitude towards Great Britain, when it was not one of disaffection and hostility, was at least one of alienation and indifference.

Grattan's theory of parliamentary reform, again, was essentially a Whig one. He looked with undisguised abhorrence on the subversive and levelling theory of government which the French Revolution had introduced into the world; that ‘Gallic plant,’ as he picturesquely described it, ‘whose fruit is death, though it is not the tree of knowledge.’ He always believed that a country with social and religious divisions, and antecedents of property such as exist in Ireland, is totally unfit for democracy, and he clearly saw that to govern Ireland on democratic principles would lead to political ruin. Although he strenuously maintained that religious belief should not form the line of political division or exclusion, he was in one sense a strong advocate for Protestant ascendency. At every period of his life he contended that Ireland could only be well governed when its political system was so organised that the direction and control of the country was in the hands of Irish property and Irish intelligence. We have already seen how he denounced the profligate manner in which peerages were bestowed, on the ground that it was destroying the moral authority of an influence which was exceedingly necessary in Ireland. In one of his speeches he predicted that the attempts to pervert and disgrace the peerage were certain to lead men to desire its extinction, and declared that a Minister who pursued such a course was a pioneer to the leveller, for he was demolishing the moral influences that support authority, rank, and subordination. 1 In another he asserted that ‘no country was ever temperately or securely conducted’ without an Upper Chamber. 2 In a third he declared that, bad as was the existing state of Irish representation, he would prefer it to the system of personal and individual representation advocated by the United Irishmen, which would ‘destroy the influence of landed property,’ and thus give up the ‘vital and fundamental articles of the British Constitution;’ and he proceeded to predict with a terrible distinctness what an Irish Parliament would be, if it were disconnected from the property of the country. ‘This plan of personal representation,’ he said, ‘from a revolution of power would speedily lead to a revolution of property, and become a plan of plunder as well as a scene of confusion. For if you transfer the power of the State to those who have nothing in the country, they will afterwards transfer the property. … Of such a representation the first ordinance would be robbery, accompanied with the circumstance incidental to robbery, murder.’ ‘The best method,’ he said, in the same speech, ‘of securing the parliamentary Constitution, is to embody in its support the mass of property, which will be generally found to include the mass of talents.’ 1 He severely censured the policy of the Government towards the Catholics in 1792, because it tended ‘to detach and divide the landed interest of the Catholics from the body at large,’ and in this way, ‘to destroy the subordination of the common people, and to set population adrify from the influence of property.’ 2 He was strongly opposed, it is true, to the Government by an oligarchy which subsisted in Ireland, but he opposed it mainly on the ground that it so narrowed the basis of representation that the great mass of freeholders, leaseholders, and resident trading interests in the country possessed not more than a fifth of the representation. 3 Of his own policy he said, ‘It leads from personal representation, not to it; it ascertains representation to property, and to the propertied community, and whatever force, weight, influence, or authority both possess, unites them against the attempts in favour of personal representation.’ 4 And a very similar train of thought continually appears in his opposition to the Union. One of his strongest arguments against that measure was that it would do what in Ireland was peculiarly dangerous, take the government of the country out of the hands of the resident gentry, shatter or seriously weaken the authority of property and education, and thus throw the political guidance of the nation into the hands of demagogues and charlatans. I have elsewhere quoted his striking prophecy that Ireland would one day avenge herself for the loss of her Parliament and Constitution by sending into the English Parliament ‘a hundred of the greatest scoundrels in the kingdom.’

This type of policy is not popular in the present day, but it is necessary clearly to understand it, in order to estimate truly the position of Grattan in Irish history. With two or three exceptions the reforming party which followed his banner in Parliament was wholly alien to the spirit of the French Revolution; and even in advocating parliamentary reform, the language of the most prominent members of the party was much more akin to that of Burke than to that of Paine. ‘The right of universal suffrage,’ said one of them, ‘is utterly incompatible with the preservation of property in this country or any other. I know well that the means by which the hands of the many are held off from the possessions of the few are a nice and artificial contrivance of civilised society. The physical strength is theirs already. If we add to that the strength of convention and compact, all is at their mercy.’ And the same speaker added that the opposition between the French party and the Whig Club in Ireland was so strong that the former would prefer the present system with all its anomalies to Ponsonby's Reform Bill. 1 Among all the considerable politicians in the Irish Partiament, Parsons was the one who in general approached most nearly to the United Irishmen. But on the question of the true principle of representation the language of Parsons was emphatically Whig. ‘The distemper of the times,’ he said, ‘is that most men consider how they shall get political power, not how they shall get good government. … Speculators may talk of the right of the many, but the true consideration is the good of the many, and that is to dispose the franchise so that it will produce the best representatives.’ 2

The distinction between these views and those of the United Irishmen was very manifest. The Whig Club, as we have seen, originally confined itself to supporting measures of secondary reform, which had been carried in England, such as Pension Bills, Place Bills, and a disqualification of revenue officials; and when at last in 1794 Ponsonby and Grattan introduced a Reform Bill, it was much less ambitious even than the Reform Bills of Flood. It left the suffrage and the duration of Parliament entirely unchanged, but it proposed to give an additional member to each county and to the cities of Dublin and Cork, and to enlarge the constituencies of the boroughs by throwing into them a considerable section of the adjoining country. 3 All these measures proceeded on the assumption that the Constitution of Ireland was essentially a good one, and might be amended without subverting any of its fundamental principles. In the eyes of the United Irishmen the boasted Constitution of Ireland was a mere caricature of representation, and, they proposed a complete reconstruction on the most approved principles of French democracy. They proposed that Ireland should be divided into three hundred equal electoral districts, each of them returning one member, that every full-grown male should have a vote, subject only to the condition of six months' residence, that the representatives should be paid and exempt from all property qualification, and that Parliaments should be annual. 1

While this democratic spirit was rising up among the reformers, a similar spirit was appearing in that body which was especially devoted to the interests of the Catholics. Since the quarrel of 1783 the Catholic Committee had led a very dormant existence, and it was a common feeling that the initiative in matters relating to the Catholics should be left to the Government. This appears to have been the decided opinion of Grattan, who knew that the Opposition were by no means unanimous on the question, and who keenly felt that it would be very unfavourable to the Catholic cause if it were made a party question. The direction of the Catholic body had hitherto been almost altogether in the hands of their prelates, and of a few noblemen—among whom Lord Kenmare was the most conspicuous—closely connected with the Government. But another type of Catholic leader, springing out of the rich trading class, was now appearing, and it found a leader of some ability in John Keogh, a Dublin tradesman, who for many years exercised much influence over Irish politics.

Several circumstances were conspiring to make this party ascendant in the Catholic Committee. Towards the close of 1790 the Catholic Committee waited upon Major Hobart, requesting him to support a petition to Parliament which asked for nothing specific, but simply prayed that the case of the Catholics should be taken into consideration; but their request was refused, and they could not find a single member to present their petition to Parliament. In the course of the same year an address of loyalty, intended to be presented to Lord Westmorland by the Catholics, on the occasion of a visit of the Lord-Lieutenant to Cork, was returned to them, because it, concluded with a hope that their loyalty would lead to a further relaxation of the penal code. In the beginning of 1791 a deputation from the Catholic Committee went to the Castle with a list of the penal laws which they were anxious to have modified or repealed, but they were dismissed without even the courtesy of an answer. 1

Lord Kenmare and the leading gentry on the Committee would have gladly desisted from all further agitation; they regarded with extreme aversion the projects of union for the purpose of achieving parliamentary reform held out by the Dissenters, and a quarrel broke out on these points between the two sections of the Committee, which continued during a great part of 1791. At last the party of Lord Kenmare, which included most of the country gentry, proposed a resolution leaving the measure and extent of future relaxations of the disabilities wholly to the Legislature; but the more democratic members of the Committee successfully resisted it. Lord Kenmare and more than sixty of the principal gentry of the party then formally seceded from the Committee, 2 and presented, in December 1791, a separate address to the Lord-Lieutenant, asking for a further repeal of the laws affecting the Catholics, but leaving the extent wholly to the Legislature. 3 The original Committee thus passed completely under the influence of the more democratic party, and it was noticed as a symptom of the new spirit appearing in the Catholic body, that resolutions were passed in almost all the counties and large towns of the kingdom approving of its conduct, and censuring the sixty-eight seceders. 4

The great and rapid growth of the Catholic commercial interest is one of the facts most constantly adverted to in the early years of George III., and it had given a new independence to the Catholic body. Their political importance had been greatly increased by the tendency to unite the Catholic question with the question of parliamentary reform which had appeared among the reformers of the North, and a considerable amount of new and energetic life was infused into the Catholic Committee by an election which took place in the spring of 1790. 5 The position of the Catholics was, it is true, very different from what it had been twenty years before, but it may be questioned whether their sense of their grievances had proportionately abated. They were no longer a crushed, torpid, impoverished body with scarcely any interest in political affairs. The relaxations that enabled them to live in peace, and the industrial prosperity that enabled them to acquire wealth, education, and local importance, had retained in the country enterprising and ambitious men who in a former generation would have sought a career in France, or Austria, or Spain. Every great movement which had taken place since the accession of George III. had contributed to deepen their sense of the anomaly of their position. The Octennial Act had created a strong political life in Ireland, but the Catholics alone were excluded from its benefits. The American struggle had made it a commonplace of politics that representation and taxation were inseparably connected, but the denomination which included some four-fifths of the Irish people did not possess the smallest eontrol over the national revenue. The Revolution of 1782 had placed Ireland, ostensibly at least, in the rank of free and self-governed kingdoms, but it left the Catholics with no more political rights than the serfs of Russia or of Poland. The very law that enabled them to acquire land, made them more sensible of the disqualification, which in their case alone, deprived land of the franchise which the Constitution had annexed to it. The French Revolution had persuaded multitudes that government is the inalienable right of the majority, and even among those who repudiated the principles of Rousseau and Paine, it had greatly raised the standard of political requirements, and increased the hostility to political inequalities and disqualifications.

It was impossible, indeed, that in such a state of society, intelligent Catholics could contemplate their own position in Ireland without feelings of the keenest humiliation and resentment. Though they represented the immense majority of the people, they were wholly excluded from the executive, from the legislative, from the judicial powers of the State; from all right of voting in parliamentary and municipal elections; from all control over the national expenditure; from all share in the patronage of the Crown. They were marked out by the law as a distinct nation, to be maintained in separation from the Protestants, and in permanent subjection to them. Judged by the measure of its age, the Irish Parliament had shown great liberality during the last twenty years, but the injury and the insult of disqualification still met the Catholic at every turn. From the whole of the great and lucrative profession of the law he was still absolutely excluded, and by the letter of the law the mere fact of a lawyer marrying a Catholic wife and educating his children as Catholics incapacitated him from pursuing his profession. Land and trade had been thrown open to Catholics almost without restrictions, but the Catholic tenant still found himself at a frequent disadvantage, because he had no vote and no influence with those who administered local justice, and the Catholic trader because he had no voice in the corporations of the towns. Cathohcs had begun to take a considerable place among the moneyed men of Ireland; but when the Bank of Ireland was founded in 1782, it was specially provided that no Catholics might be enrolled among its directors. Medicine was one of the few professions from which they had never been excluded, and some of them had risen to large practice in it, but even here they were subject to galling distinctions. They were incapacitated from holding any of the three medical professorships on the University establishment, or any of the four professorships at the School of Physic, or the more recently created clinical professorship; and the law, while excluding native Catholics from these professorships, actually ordered that, for three months previous to the nomination to a vacancy in them, invitations should be circulated through Europe inviting Protestants of all nations to compete for them. 1 Catholic physicians were excluded from all situations on the army establishment, from the offices of State physician or surgeon, and from a crowd of places held under charter, patent, or incorporation; and as they could not take the rank of Fellow in the College of Physicians, they were unable to hold any office in that body.

The social effects of the code continued with little abatement, though mere theological animosity had almost died away. The political helplessness of the lower orders in their relation with the upper classes had injuriously affected the whole tone of manners, and the few Catholic gentry could not but feel that they were members of an inferior class, living under the stigma and the disqualifications of the law. Most Catholics who had risen to wealth had done so as merchants or cattle dealers, and the mercantile classes in Ireland had very little social position. The old Catholic gentry lived much apart, and had but small intercourse with the Protestants. The exclusion of Catholics from the bar was in this respect peculiarly mischievous, for of all professions the bar is that which does most to bring men of various religions into close and frequent contact. There were convivial clubs in Ireland in which it was a by-law that no papist should be admitted, 1 and Burke, probably, scarcely exaggerated when he asserted that there were thousands of persons of the upper orders in Ireland, who had never in their lives conversed with a Catholic, unless they happened to talk to their gardener's workmen, or to ask their way, when they had lost it, in their sports. 2

It was quite evident that such a state of society was thoroughly unnatural and demoralising, and it was equally evident that it could not possibly be permanent. One great work of the Irish Parliament during the past generation had been the gradual removal of religious disqualifications and monopolies, but the most serious part of the task was still to be accomplished, and the French Revolution had forced on the question, to an immediate issue. The process of slow enfranchisements, which had once been gratefully received, was scarcely possible in the changed condition of the public mind. A declaration issued by the Catholic Committee in October 1791, demanding in strong terms a complete abolition of all parts of the penal code, was a significant sign of the new spirit which had arisen, and it was evident that the principles of the North had found some lodgment in the minds of the new Catholic leaders. The Catholic Committee was reorganised, and placed more completely under the influence of the democratic party; and despairing of help from the Administration of Ireland, it resolved to send a deputation to England. The resolution was accomplished, and in January 1792 Keogh and four other delegates laid the petition of the Catholics before the King.

The task which now lay before the Ministers was one which demanded the highest statesmanship, and the whole future history of Ireland depended mainly on the manner in which it was accomplished. If the enfranchisement of the Catholics could be successfully carried out, if the chasm that yawned between the two great sections of the Irish people could be finally bridged, if an identity of interests and sympathies could be established between the members of the two creeds, Ireland would indeed become a nation, and she might reasonably look forward to a continuous growth of power and prosperity. If on the other hand the task was tardily or unskilfully accomplished, there were dangers of the most terrible and the most permanent character to be feared. Religious animosities and class antipathies which had long been slumbering might be revived in all their fierceness. The elements of anarchy and agitation which lay only too abundantly in a population poor, ignorant, turbulent, and superstitious beyond almost any in Europe, might be let loose and turned into politics. The Catholics of Ireland, who had hitherto scarcely awakened to political life, and whose leaders had been uniformly loyal, and much more inclined to lean towards the English Government than towards the Irish Parliament, might be permanently alienated from the connection. In the clash of discordant elements, Ireland might be once more cursed with the calamities of civil war; and confiscations and penal laws had placed landed property so exclusively in the hands of the ascendant class, that a danger still graver than rebellion might be feared. It was that which Burke truly called ‘the most irreconcilable quarrel that can divide a nation—a struggle for the landed property of the whole kingdom.’ 1

While the sentiments I have described were rapidly extending among the more intelligent Catholics and among the Presbyterians of the North, the governing classes in Ireland experienced a full measure of that dread of reform and innovation which the French Revolution had made predominant among men in authority. The Catholic question now presented itself to them, not as in 1778 and 1782 as a question of religious toleration, and of the removal of penal inflictions, but as a question of the transfer of political power and of the destruction of an old monopoly of representation. It was also avowedly and ostentatiously associated with the demand for a searching parliamentary reform which would break down the system of nomination boroughs, and establish the representation on a broad popular basis. No prospect could be more alarming to the small group of men who controlled the Government and almost monopolised the patronage of Ireland. The Chancellor, Fitzgibbon, was steadily opposed to all concessions to the Catholics, and he devoted his great ability and his arrogant but indomitable will to rallying the party of the Opposition. The Beresfords, the Elys, and several other of the great borough owners, and in general the officials who were most closely connected with the Castle, were equally violent in their opposition.

In England, however, different motives were at work. Pitt and the majority of the other Ministers were free from every vestige of religious intolerance, and the events of the French Revolution had thrown them into close alliance with the Catholics of Europe. It was not merely a question of political alliance but of genuine sympathy, for Catholicism was the most natural and most powerful moral force that could be opposed to that spirit of antichristian revolution which was now assuming such a menacing aspect in Europe. The overtures made by the revolutionary Protestant Dissenters to the Catholics justly appeared very alarming to the English Ministers. Hitherto it had been their policy to act as the champion or at least the protector of the Catholics; not, indeed, risking any serious convulsion for their sake, but on the whole favouring the abolition of the penal laws, moderating their administration, protecting the Catholics from local tyranny. There seemed now some danger that a power which was naturally conservative should be thrown into the opposite scale, and that the Catholic relief question, which the Ministers were inclined to favour, should be employed to obtain a parliamentary reform to which they were strongly opposed. It appeared, therefore, to the English Ministers a matter of great importance to break this incipient alliance, and by giving greater weight to the Catholics to turn them into a conservative influence in the Constitution.

There were two other considerations which had great weight. In the first place the question of the position of the English Catholics had been again taken up. The circumstances of Catholicism in England and Ireland were entirely different, but experience had shown that legislation on this subject in one country was tolerably sure to be followed by a demand for legislation in the other.

I have already related the history of Mitford's Act, which in 1791 relieved English Catholics who took the oath provided by the statute, from all the laws against recusancy which had been passed under Elizabeth and James I.; restored them to a full right of celebrating their worship and educating their children; admitted them to be barristers, solicitors, attorneys, clerks, and notaries, and freed them from several petty and vexatious restrictions to which they had been liable. This measure, as we have seen, was carried with the concurrence of both sections in the Parliament, and it naturally strengthened the claim of the Irish Catholics for a larger measure of relief.

Another circumstance which was favourable to the Catholic cause was the influence of Edmund Burke, who had just broken away from the old Opposition and entered into alliance with the Government. Burke had himself married a Catholic lady, and his sympathies with his Catholic countrymen were both strong and steady. As early as 1765 he had treated of their wrongs in his ‘Tracts upon the Popery Code,’ and he recurred to the subject in writings in 1778, in 1780, and in 1782. 1 At the time of which I am now writing he was, perhaps, in the zenith of his influence. In 1790 his ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ had appeared, and it exercised a greater influence than any political writing in England, at least since the days of Swift. He was regarded as the special and greatest advocate and representative of Conservative principles in England, and his voice was therefore especially weighty when he supported a measure of reform.

In his letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, which was written and published in the beginning of 1792, and still more in his private correspondence, his policy was clearly disclosed. He was prepared to go as far as a complete or almost complete removal of incapacities, ‘but leisurely, by degrees, and portion by portion.’ 1 He urged the absolute necessity of blending the two great sections of the Irish people, the extreme danger as well as the extreme injustice of maintaining a system of permanent political monopoly, the certainty that such a system must one day break down, the danger of persuading the Catholics that their only hope of entering the Constitution was by the assistance of democratic Dissenters. ‘If you should make this experiment at last,’ he wrote, ‘under the pressure of any necessity, you never can do it well.’ ‘At present you may make the desired admission without altering the system of your representation in the smallest degree or in any part. You may leave that deliberation of a parliamentary change or reform, if ever you should think fit to engage in it, uncomplicated and unembarrassed with the other question;’ you may ‘measure your concessions’ and proceed by degrees without ‘unfixing old interests’ at once. ‘Reflect seriously on the possible consequences of keeping in the hearts of your community a bank of discontent, every hour accumulating, upon which every description of seditious men may draw at pleasure.’

The difficulties and dangers of the question, if it was taken up at once and in the spirit that has been indicated, seemed to him enormously exaggerated. He reminded Langrishe that the English Parliament had very recently given to Canada a popular representative by the choice of the landholders, and an aristocratic representative at the choice of the Crown, and that no religious disqualification was introduced in either case. It was said that the Irish Catholics had been reduced by the long depression of the law to the state of a mob, and that ‘whenever they came to act many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight.’ If that be the case, ought not Irish statesmen to apply at once ‘a remedy to the real cause of the evil’? ‘If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristocratic interest, that is, an interest of property and education amongst them, and to strengthen by every prudent means the authority and influence of men of that description.’ It was one excellence of our Constitution, that elective rights are always attached rather to property than to person. In Ireland the standard of qualification may be too low or not judiciously chosen, and it may be a question whether it may not be prudent ‘to raise a step or two the qualifications of the Catholic voters.’ For his own part, however, he doubted it. ‘If you were to-morrow to put the Catholic freeholder on the footing of the most favoured forty-shilling Protestant freeholder, you know that such is the actual state of Ireland, this would not make a sensible alteration in almost any one election in the kingdom. The effect in their favour even defensively would be infinitely slow.’ 1 In the present state of Europe, he argued, ‘it is of infinite moment that matters of grace should emanate from the old sovereign authority.’

His estimate of the different parties in Ireland is curious and far from complimentary. The difference between the Irish Protestant and the Irish Catholic appeared to him to be mainly that between ‘the cat looking out of the window, and the cat looking in at the window,’ between ‘being in or out of power.’ The Protestants had been somewhat specially corrupted by the long monopoly of ‘jobbish power,’ and the Catholics by continued habits of servility. 2 On both sides religious animosity was almost extinct, and he actually suggested that it was quite within the limits of probability that in the general decadence of theology the Catholics might, through political reasons, be converted into Protestant Dissenters. 3 Their clergy, he thought, had at no time within his observation much influence over their people. ‘I have never known an instance (until a few of them were called into action by the manæuvres of the Castle), that in secular concerns they took any part at all. … Though not wholly without influence … they have rather less than any other clergy I know.’ 4 As for the Protestants, they have lost most of their old prejudices. ‘They are jobbers as their fathers were, but with this difference, their fathers had false principles. The present race, I suspect, have none. … They have a reasonable share of good nature. If they could be once got to think that the Catholics were human creatures, and that they lost no job by thinking them such, I am convinced that they would soon, very soon indeed, be led to show some regard to their country.’ 1 The difficulty of inducing them to give full political privileges to Catholics lay chiefly in the selfish interests of a small junto of monopolists. In a curiously candid letter to his son, he expressed his wish that the Catholics would ‘leave off the topic of which some of them are so fond, that of attributing the continuance of their grievances to English interests or dispositions, to which they suppose the welfare of Ireland is sacrificed.’ No notion, he declared, could be more groundless. Englishmen were perfectly indifferent to the question whether Catholics had or had not a share in the election of members of the Irish Parliament. ‘Since the independency (and even before) the jobs of that Government are almost wholly in their hands.’ ‘I have never known any of the successive Governments in my time, influenced by any [other] passion relative to Ireland than the wish that they should hear of it and of its concerns as little as possible.’ ‘The present set of Ministers partake of that disposition in a larger measure than any of their predecessors with whom I have been acquainted,’ and the whole Government of Ireland has been willingly left to ‘a junto of jobbers.’ 2

The peculiar position of Edmund Burke led the Catholic Committee to take a step of much importance. They had for some time been accustomed to seek literary and other help outside their own body, and they now determined to ask Richard Burke, the only son of Edmund Burke, to act as their paid adviser. He was a practising barrister, and his selection as the professional representative of the Catholics seemed a most effectual answer to those who accused them of sympathising with the French Revolution, and was at the same time likely to enlist in the cause the influence, the counsel, and perhaps the pen of a man who had then great weight with the Ministers, and a supreme influence over English public opinion. The appointment was made in August 1790, before the separation of Lord Kenmare and his party from the Catholic Committee, but the services of Richard Burke appear at first to have been exclusively literary, and they did not prevent him from proceeding to Coblentz on a mission to the French princes, who were in that city. 1 On his return, however, towards the close of 1791, he was at once invited to take a more active part, and especially to solicit the Ministers in behalf of the Catholics. 2 In the course of December he had conversations on the subject with Dundas, and also with Hobart, who had for a short time come over from Ireland. He was instructed by the Catholic Committee to ask that the Roman Catholics might be admitted to all departments of the law, to the magistracy, and to the minor offices of county administration; that they might be entitled to serve in all cases both on grand and petty juries, and that they might obtain the elective franchise, but only in the counties.

Although his talents appear to have been greatly over-estimated by his father, Richard Burke was in truth by no means destitute of ability, but he displayed a rather unusual measure of the common and characteristic faults of amateur diplomatists. His want of tact, his tendency to exaggeration and overstatement, his meddling, officious, and dictatorial demeanour, were soon painfully conspicuous. When he went to Ireland, Dundas warned him that the English Government could hold no communication on the Catholic question except through the Irish Government, and that he must therefore communicate exclusively with it. 3 He easily gathered that the Ministers were convinced that it was necessary to grant a measure of relief to the Catholics, in order to win them over to their side. He also gathered clearly that while the Ministers were determined to make some concessions, they were disposed to abandon the capital one of the elective franchise, not on account of any English reluctance, but because of the determined hostility among the leading men in the Irish Government and Parliament. These opinions Richard Burke appears to have fully declared, and in the course of a few months residence in Ireland, he very unduly raised the hopes of the Catholics, flung the Irish Government into a paroxysm of jealousy and anger, entered into negotiation with a number of independent interests in the Irish Parliament, and greatly embarrassed the English Government. In September 1792, the Catholic Committee finally broke with him.

We must now proceed to examine more particularly the real intentions of the Government as disclosed in their secret and confidential correspondence. No portion of this correspondence is more instructive than that which relates to the early period of the Viceroyalty of Westmorland. It shows with great clearness the opposition between the views of the Ministers in London, and those of the Ministers in Dublin.

In October 1791, when Richard Burke had not yet arrived in Ireland, Lord Grenville wrote to Westmorland that he had been speaking with Hobart and with Parnell, on the subject of the Irish Catholics. He does not announce any conclusion, and writes with evident perplexity, but it is easy to detect the current of his thoughts. ‘I am very sensible,’ he writes, ‘how imperfect my ideas are likely to be on a subject on which so much more local and personal knowledge than I possess are required, in order to enable anyone to form a correct judgment. But I cannot help feeling a very great anxiety that such measures may be taken, as may effectually counteract the union between the Catholics and Dissenters at which the latter are evidently aiming. I may be a false prophet, but there is no evil that I would not prophesy if that union takes place in the present moment, and on the principles on which it is endeavoured to bring it about.’ 1

During several months, the English Government had been receiving from Lord Westmorland alarming accounts of the incendiary papers that were being circulated in Ireland; of the renewed activity of the Catholic question, and especially of the determined efforts to unite the questions of Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform, and to combine in a single league the Northern Dissenters with the Catholics. At length on December 26, 1791, Dundas wrote to Westmorland two very remarkable letters—one of them intended to be laid before the Irish Council, and the other strictly confidential—conveying the policy of the English Government. In the former letter he began by expressing the great concern with which the Government had observed the recent attempts to associate together persons of different religious denominations in Ireland for seditious purposes, and his hopes that the Catholics would repudiate all attempts to seduce them from that ‘quiet and regular demeanour,’ to which past favours were due. and from which alone future indulgences might be justly expected. At the same time he announced the opinion of the confidential servants of the King, that ‘it is essentially necessary, as well on grounds of justice as of sound policy, to give a favourable ear to the fair claims of the Catholics of Ireland,’ and he directed the Lord-Lieutenant to use ‘his best endeavours to obtain a consideration of this subject divested of the prejudices arising from former animosities, the original grounds of which seem no longer to exist.’ ‘The Roman Catholics,’ he adds, ‘form the great body of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Ireland, and as such are entitled to the communication of all such advantages as can be given them without danger to the existing establishments and to the general interests of the Empire.’ Their conduct for a long series of years, as well as the interest which they have acquired in property, make it very unlikely that they would ‘act on those principles on which their original exclusion was founded. It is, therefore, well worthy of serious consideration how far it is wise for those who look forward to the preservation of the present frame of the Irish Government, to run the risk of exciting a dangerous antipathy against that frame of Government in the minds of the great body of the people, who by the present laws are secluded from … any right to vote even in the election of representatives for counties.’ The newly acquired importance and independence of the Irish Parliament makes this exclusion especially galling, and in the opinion of the English Ministers it is much more dangerous to the Protestant interest than such ‘a moderate and qualified participation’ in the right of election as would give them a stake in the political prosperity of the country.

At the same time, while very powerfully urging the arguments in defence of this position, Dundas does not impose it on the confidential servants of the Crown in Ireland ‘in the shape of a decision.’ It is the genuine opinion of the English Ministers. It is an opinion they greatly wish to see adopted by the Irish Protestants, but if ‘the sentiments of the leading descriptions of persons in the Irish Parliament should be decidedly adverse to this proposal at present,’ he insists only that ‘at least the door should not be understood to be finally shut against the Catholics, if hereafter men's minds should become reconciled to the extension of further privileges, and if their conduct should afford fresh ground for thinking that such privileges may be given with safety.’ In order to secure Ireland against dangerous and desperate commotions, it is necessary that the Catholics should be fully convinced that any attempts to carry their objects by force or intimidation will be resisted to the utmost, and that peaceful and dutiful conduct will be rewarded by a continuous though gradual improvement of their situation.

This, then, was the position of the English Government on the question of conferring the franchise on the Catholics. But whatever resolution might be adopted on this question at Dublin, the Lord-Lieutenant is directed to inform the confidential servants of the Crown that it is ‘the decided opinion’ of the English Government that the Roman Catholics of Ireland have a claim, which neither in justice or policy can be refused, to be at least placed on as favourable a footing as their coreligionists in England. In order to attain this end, the Lord-Lieutenant is directed to review the remaining laws against the Catholics, with the object of recommending to the Irish Parliament the repeal of five classes. It was to be asked to repeal all laws which imposed any special obstruction on the Catholics in the exercise of any profession, trade, or manufacture; which restricted the intermarriage of the members of the two creeds; which interfered with the unlimited power of the Catholic father in the mode or place of education of his children; which made a distinction between Protestant and papist in the use of arms, and which prevented them from serving either on grand or petty juries. 1

The official despatch was accompanied by a private and very significant letter, intended for the eye of the Lord-Lieutenant alone. Under ordinary circumstances, wrote Dundas, the Irish Government and Protestant interest have a right to look for the support and protection of Great Britain, but they must not push this expectation too far. ‘The public and the Parliament of Great Britain should feel that the object for which their aid is demanded is one in which they are interested, or in which, at least, the Irish Government is founded in justice and policy, in resisting the wishes of the body of the people of Ireland. If it is a mere question whether one description of Irishmen or another are to enjoy a monopoly or pre-eminence,’ these conditions will not be fulfilled, and English opinion will not justify the application of English resources for the purpose of keeping the Irish Catholics in a continued state of political proscription. Besides this, the country may soon be at war, and if the Catholic grievances are then unredressed, it is tolerably certain that an attempt will be made to extort by force what is denied as a matter of grace. The example of the volunteers is but too plain, and Catholics had their part in the triumph of 1782. In conclusion Dundas gave it as his decided opinion, ‘that there cannot be a permanency in the frame of the Government and Constitution of Ireland unless the Protestants will lay aside their prejudices, forego their exclusive pre-eminence, and gradually open their arms to the Roman Catholies, and put them on the same footing with every other species of Dissenter.’ 2

The policy indicated in these despatches appears to me, in its broad lines, both temperate and wise, but it was received by the Lord-Lieutenant with absolute consternation. The effect of any intimation to the principal servants of the Crown in Ireland that the English Government contemplated it, would in his opinion be most disastrous, would probably prevent them from making any concessions whatever, and would be almost certain to unite them against the Government of Pitt. After some preliminary correspondence, however, with the English Government, he brought the chief points before his Privy Council, and on January 14, 1792, he wrote to the Government the result. Those who were present were Fitzgibbon the Chancellor, the Attorney-General, Beresford, the Archbishop of Cashel, the Prime Sergeant, and Sir John Parnell. Of these persons Beresford and the Archbishop of Cashel appeared on the whole averse to any concessions whatever, but in the end there was a general though hesitating and reluctant assent to the wishes of the Government upon the three articles of professions, intermarriage, and education. On the question of juries a reservation was made with reference to grand juries. To admit Catholics into bodies which gave so much consequence and power would be extremely likely to excite the alarm and jealousy of the Protestant gentry, and although such a concession might be abstractly proper, it would be wiser to take no steps till the dispositions of the Irish Parliament had been carefully sounded. The concession of an unlimited right of carrying arms was pronounced to be completely inadmissible. Independently of all religious considerations, it was vitally necessary to the security of the country that the Government should retain the power of disarming the lower classes of the people, who were nearly all Roman Catholics, and exceedingly tumultuous. This was sufficiently proved by ‘their numerous insurrections against tithes, the number of forcible possessions, the demolitions of fences which had occurred, their frequent attacks upon revenue officers and escorts, and their numerous rescues of seizures and prisoners.’ Every Roman Catholic of decent rank might obtain a licence to carry arms; the law on the subject was never put in force except for the prevention of mischief, and no man could wish to put arms in the hands of the lower class in Ireland, but for the purpose of anarchy and sedition. The situation of the English Catholics was quite different, for they were a very small and highly respectable body, drawn chiefly from the upper and middle classes of society. This point was not ‘even mentioned in the application of the Roman Catholics, and the concession would be as much disrelished by the Catholic gentlemen of property as by the Protestants.’