Much more important was the fact that there was, properly speaking, no ministry in Ireland responsible to the Irish Parliament. The position of Irish Ministers was essentially different from the position of their colleagues in England. Ministerial power was mainly in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant and of his Chief Secretary, and this latter functionary led the House of Commons, introduced for the most part Government business, and filled in Ireland a position at least as important as that of a Prime Minister in England. But the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary were not politicians who had risen to prominence and leadership in the Irish Parliament. They were Englishmen, strangers to Ireland, appointed and instructed by English Ministers, and changed with each succeeding Administration. The Irish Government was thus completely subordinated to the play of party government in England. An Irish administration which commanded the full confidence of the Irish Parliament might at any moment be overthrown by a vote in the English Parliament on some purely English question.

This appears to me to have been a fatal fault in the Constitution of 1782. It explains why the duty of ‘supporting English Government,’ as distinguished from party allegiance, was represented by very honest politicians, as a maxim essential to the safe working of the Irish Constitution. The form of Government was wholly different from that which now exists in the free colonies of England. In those colonies the English governor holds an essentially neutral position. He is appointed for a term of years irrespective of party changes, and although on a very few points affecting the Empire at large, he receives instructions from England, he is not the real source or originator of colonial legislation. The local Parliament divides itself into two great sections representing colonial opinions. Colonial parties are entirely distinct from English ones. The leaders of the dominant section become naturally the Ministers; and when one side of the House is discredited, power is at once and without difficulty transferred to the other. If the local Parliament desired to sever the connection with the mother country, it would be a most formidable instrument in doing so; but as long as it has no such wish, it is found by experience that under this system, great convulsions of opinion and changes of power may take place, either in England or the colonies, without in the smallest degree straining the connection, or affecting the position of the representative of the Crown. Colonial and English policy move on different planes, and except on very rare occasions there can be no friction or collision. But such a form of government as existed in Ireland must necessarily have led to the gravest contest, if the Irish Parliament became a really representative body, fluctuating with the fluctuations of Irish opinion, and at the same time moving on English party lines. It would be absurd to suppose that the balance of parties in the two Legislatures could be always the same, and would always vibrate in harmony, and it was not only possible, but in the highest degree probable, that the time would come when the full tide of party feeling would be running in one direction in England, and in the opposite in Ireland. Could a Constitution then subsist under which an English Cabinet appointed and directed the administration of Ireland?

Under any circumstances the difficulty of keeping the Irish Parliament free from the contagion of English party spirit must have been considerable. Ireland was too near England, and too variously and closely connected with her, not to feel her dominant impulses. Some seats in the Irish House of Commons were at the disposal of great English noblemen who were conspicuous in English politics. Flood, Conolly, and several of the Chief Secretaries held seats at the same time in the Parliaments both of England and Ireland, and close ties of friendship, relationship, and common education connected many of the leading personages in the two countries. Every cause that acted powerfully on English opinion was followed eagerly in Ireland, and some of the questions that were most vitally important to Ireland were party questions in England. Irish viceroys continually represented to the English Government the danger of introducing in England measures for parliamentary reform, or for the relief of the Catholics, on account of the influence they were certain to have in Ireland. But that part of the Constitution which made the Executive in Ireland mainly dependent on English party changes, made it impossible to keep Ireland permanently external to English party divisions, and in a reformed Parliament it could not, as it seems to me, have long continued.

I have already quoted the Duke of Portland's lament, in 1782, that he found the Whigs were not looked on in Ireland as in any way superior to the Tories; and that the general maxim of supporting the King's Government had taken the place of party allegiance. 1 In 1784, the Duke of Rutland, who had just become Lord Lieutenant, in a confidential letter to Lord Sydney adopted the opposite view, and dwelt on it with great emphasis. He mentioned that the addresses to him on assuming the government of Ireland were carried through both Houses with the single dissent of the Duke of Leinster, who had privately informed him that he must oppose the Administration. This, Rutland said, showed an evident intention to make the present state of English politics a ground for opposition in Ireland, and he adds that, in agreement with most of the leading people in Ireland, he was very anxious ‘to separate and keep away every mixture of English politics and party division from the conduct of affairs.’ It would be, he said, ‘a most serious misfortune to Ireland, and a great risk to her tranquillity and good order, if she had any implication in the consequences of those divisions and animosities which unhappily prevail in Great Britain.’ It is impossible to draw off the attention of many considerable persons in Ireland from English politics. They do ‘very materially influence their conduct as to the degree of support and assistance they will engage to give.’ Security must be given, ‘on very high terms indeed, that particular persons shall be benefited, without being liable to disappointment in case of new changes in administration. I have not a doubt but that the principle of supporting English government prevails over any other, where no bias of interest is thrown on either side, and the good disposition towards his Majesty's service is very generally, and I believe sincerely, professed.’ 2

It must be added that the English doctrine that a parliamentary censure carried against a ministry, or the defeat of an important ministerial measure, must be followed by a resignation, was not recognised in Ireland. Of this fact we shall have more than one illustration in the following pages. The inferiority, however, of the Irish House of Commons in this respect, appears to me to have been a good deal exaggerated; for it is, I think, plain that a parliament, in which the ministers were in a permanent mimority, possessed ample power of driving them from office. If an English ministry, which has lost the confidence or incurred the condemnation of the House of Commons, now retires from office, this is not because there is any law compelling it to do so, but simply because the House of Commons exercises such a commanding power in the State that it would be impossible to govern without its concurrence. The Irish Parliament also, under the Constitution of 1782, possessed a great reserve of coercive power. Without the annual Mutiny Act the army could not be supported. Without the additional duties which were voted, at first biennially and afterwards annually, the public service could not be carried on. The magnitude of the hereditary revenue, and the absence of an appropriation Act, placed a much larger proportion of the revenues in Ireland out of the control of the Parliament than in England, and gave great facilities for corruption; but the hereditary revenue consisted mainly of duties voted in perpetuity, which could never be efficiently collected without the assistance of Parliament. 1

These remarks will, I think, be sufficient to show how impossible it would have been to preserve the Constitution of 1782 unchanged, if the Irish Parliament was so constituted that the balance of political power fluctuated as frequently and decisively as in England. There were also certain other points on which there was much need of supplemental legislation, and which presented grave possibilities of difficulty and danger. If the Irish endeavoured to foster their industries by protective or prohibitory duties on English goods, they would be acting in perfect accordance with the economical notions prevailing in every leading country in Europe, and especially with the precedents of English policy. There was no treaty arrangement between the two countries which prevented such a course, but it was a course which might prove both economically and politically dangerous to England. Economically, it would close against English trade a market which, in the eighteenth century, had a great importance, and which commercial jealousy considerably overrated. Politically, it might loosen the connection between the two countries, produce feelings of alienation, if not of positive hostility, and greatly strengthen the connection between Ireland and France. It was quite possible that some foreign country might become more closely connected with Ireland than England. At the same time there was no provision whatever for the formation of an Irish navy, or for any participation of Ireland in the expense of the British Navy, which protected Irish commerce. It was noticed in 1783 that the whole navy of Ireland consisted of but six revenue cruisers. 1

In foreign policy the position of Ireland was necessarily completely subordinate. The whole subject of peace and war, alliances and confederacies, lay beyond her domain. Whenever the King of England made peace or war, Ireland was involved in his act. A declaration of war in London at once exposed her coast to invasion. A treaty of peace at once rendered it secure and bound Ireland by its terms. It was no doubt technically true that peace or war lay within the prerogative of the Crown, but the Sovereign in these as in all other matters could only act by the advice of his English Ministers, and could only select as ministers those statesmen who were supported by a majority in the British Parliament and who were prepared to carry its policy into effect. It was probable that the declaration of war would be the issue of a long train of foreign policy, repeatedly discussed and modified by the British Parliament, but the Irish Parliament would have no voice in directing its course. It was probable that the war would arise from some question with which Ireland was totally unconcerned, perhaps some commercial question relating to parts of the world from which Irish commerce was excluded. Situated indeed as Ireland was, it was scarcely possible that she should have any enemies except those who were made so by British policy, yet she was perpetually liable to be involved in British wars.

She had, however, one power which might be very efficient, but also very dangerous, to the Empire. The actual participation of Ireland in the common cause could only be effected and sustained by the independent action of the Irish Parliament. If that Parliament, disapproving of the policy which led to the war, desiring to make its power felt in the only possible way in foreign politics, disliking the Ministry which made the war, or convinced that Ireland had no interest in its issue, thought fit to withhold its assistance, the Empire might in the most critical periods be deprived of a great portion of its strength, and Ireland by a tacit arrangement with the enemy might be at peace while England was at war. From a military point of view the importance of Ireland to England was very great. Her geographical position and her excellent harbours would make her invaluable to an enemy. In times of peace she maintained an army of 15,000 men, while Great Britain usually maintained only 17,000 or 18,000, and in every war she had contributed largely to the armies in the field. 1 But under the Constitution of 1782 this assistance was purely optional, depending on the precarious and transient humours of a popular assembly. If the Irish Parliament at any time thought fit to reduce its army as excessive, it had full power to do so, and in time of war the danger that might result from the conflicting action of two independent Parliaments could hardly be overrated. In the great revolutionary war which filled the last years of the century, the English Parliament exhibited the spectacle of a minority which was fiercely opposed to the war and which did everything in its power to embarrass the Ministry that conducted it. Such a minority had a considerable and very injurious moral influence on the struggle, but being a minority it was not able to carry its designs into effect. But if the majority in the Irish Parliament had shared the sentiments of the minority in England, we should probably have seen Ireland neutralising her ports, withdrawing her troops, forbidding recruiting, passing votes of censure on the war, and addressing the King in favour of peace. Could it be questioned that under such circumstances the very existence of the Empire might have been endangered?

I hasten to add that these things never occurred. Nothing is more conspicuous in the history of the Irish Parliament than the discretion with which it abstained from all discussions on foreign policy, and the loyalty and zeal with which it invariably supported England in time of war. Pitt, in introducing the Union in 1799, 1 dwelt strongly on the dangers I have described, and represented them as leading motives of his policy; but he at the same time acknowledged that the divergences in time of war between the two Parliaments which he so gravely feared, had in fact never occurred, and Foster in that great speech, which is perhaps the best argument against the Union, observed that ‘in points of peace and war the Irish Parliament had never even during centuries differed in opinion from the British, though its power to do so had been as free and unlimited before as since the Constitution of 1782.’ On no point was the policy of Grattan more strongly marked and more consistent than in the earnestness with which he urged that in all questions of peace and war, Ireland must unreservedly follow in the wake of England. But it is the part of a prescient statesman to look forward to distant dangers and to changed dispositions. If the overwhelming power of British Government on the Irish Parliament were withdrawn; if in time of war party passions raged, and factious talent was in the ascendant; if the Parliament of Ireland ceased to be drawn exclusively from classes that were thoroughly loyal to the connection, there were grave dangers to be feared. There is reason to believe that such dangers were already vividly present to the minds of English Ministers; and as early as 1783, the Duke of Richmond had declared in Parliament, that they could only be adequately met by ‘an incorporate Union.’ 2

The effect of the simple repeal controversy on Irish politics, was very pernicious. It prolonged for several months the period of agitation. It divided the national party in Ireland, and transferred the popular ascendency from Grattan to a man of much more doubtful purity of motive. It, above all, profoundly discredited the Irish Parliament. The English Act of Renunciation was accepted as a proof that the reasoning of Flood was correct, that nothing had before been secured, that the Irish Parliament, in maintaining the adequacy of simple repeal, was betraying the liberties of the country, and that those liberties had once more been saved by the volunteers. To the pressure exerted by that body, it was said, Ireland ultimately owed her free trade, the concessions of 1782, and the final charter of 1783, and had Parliament been her sole representative, no one of these things would have been obtained. Irish freedom was now established as far as words could settle it, but could it be safely entrusted to the guardianship of an assembly, in which twenty or thirty great borough-owners could always control a majority? Might not such a parliament, it was asked, be induced to sell to an English minister its independence, or even its separate existence? Flood strenuously maintained that one more great battle must be fought before the Irish Constitution could be secure. The volunteers must induce or coerce Parliament to pass such a reform bill as would make it a true representative of the Protestant section of the nation.

The question was not altogether a new one, nor was it exclusively of home growth. In England, as we have seen, parliamentary reform had acquired a foremost place among political topics, and there was scarcely any other which stirred so strongly the popular sentiment. Chatham had strenuously advocated it, and he had predicted that, ‘before the end of the century, either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or be reformed with a vengeance from without.’ The question was brought before the English Parliament with great elaboration by Wilkes in 1776, by the Duke of Richmond in 1780, by the younger Pitt in 1782 and in 1783. Propositions for disfranchising the rotten boroughs, for enfranchising the great manufacturing towns, for adding to the electors and to the members of the counties, for annual parliaments, for universal suffrage, and for equal electoral districts, had been eagerly discussed both in Parliament and beyond its walls. Powerful democratic societies had been formed in the great cities, and they were already in close correspondence with the Irish volunteers, and extremely anxious to induce them to make the attainment of parliamentary reform a capital object of their policy. It was obvious that a victory in one country would accelerate a victory in the other, and the arguments in favour of reform were much stronger in Ireland than in England. Among the English reformers who corresponded with the Irish volunteers were the Duke of Richmond, Price, Cartwright, and Lord Effingham. In June 1782 Portland, when forwarding to the Government an address from the volunteer delegates of Ulster, thanking the English Parliament for the concessions that had been made, mentions the appearance in their resolutions of ‘some new matter respecting the state of the representation in this country, which … has been endeavoured of late to be brought into discussion by a very active emissary, who has come from England expressly for that purpose;’ 1 but it was not until the simple repeal question was raised that the subject of reform acquired real importance. In March 1783 a provincial meeting of volunteers at Cork passed resolutions in favour of parliamentary reform, and on July 1 following, delegates of forty-five companies of Ulster volunteers assembled at Lisburne, resolved to convoke for the ensuing September a great meeting of volunteers at Dungannon, to consider the best way of obtaining a more equal representation in Parliament.

In truth, even putting aside the great anomaly that the Roman Catholics were wholly unrepresented, it was a mockery to describe the Irish House of Commons as mainly a representative body. Of its 300 members, 64 only represented counties, while 100 small boroughs, containing ostensibly only an infinitesimal number of electors, and in reality in the great majority of cases at the absolute disposal of single patrons, returned no less than 200. Borough seats were commonly sold for 2,000l. a parliament, and the permanent patronage of a borough for from 8,000l. to 10,000l. The Lower House was to a great extent a creation of the Upper one. It was at this time computed that 124 members of the House of Commons were absolutely nominated by 53 peers, while 91 others were chosen by 52 commoners. 2

It needs no comment to show the absurdity and the danger of such a condition of representation. In Ireland, it is true, as in England, borough influence was not always badly used, and the sale of seats, and the system of nomination, neither of which carried with them any real reproach, introduced into Parliament many honourable, able and independent men, who were thoroughly acquainted with the condition of the country. But the state of the Irish representation was much worse than that of the English, and incomparably more dangerous to the Constitution of the country. England was at least her own mistress. The strongest minister only kept his power by a careful attention to the gusts of popular feeling, and no external power desired to tamper with her Constitution. But the relation of Ireland to England was such that it was quite conceivable that an Irish parliament might act in violent opposition to the wishes of the community which it represented, and quite possible that an English minister might wish it to do so. As long as the volunteers continued, public opinion possessed such a formidable and organised power that it could act forcibly on Parliament. But once that organisation was dissolved, the reign of a corrupt oligarchy must revive. However independent the Irish Parliament might be in the eyes of the law and in the theory of the Constitution, it could not fail to be a dependent and subordinate body holding a precarious existence, as long as a full third of its members were placemen or pensioners, and as long as the English Minister could control the election of the majority of its members. Some borough seats were at the disposal of bishops appointed by Government. Some were in the hands of great English noblemen. It was only necessary to secure a small number of great native borough-owners, to obtain a compact majority independent of all fluctuations of popular feeling. The lavish distribution of peerages had proved the cheapest and most efficacious means of governing Parliament, and a pamphleteer in 1783 reminded his countrymen that since 1762 inclusive, the Irish peerage had been enriched or degraded by the addition of thirty-three barons, sixteen viscounts, and twenty-four earls. 1

During the short Administration of Lord Temple, which lasted only from September 1782 till the following spring, and corresponded with the Shelburne Ministry in England, the Reform agitation scarcely appeared. This Lord Lieutenant was son of George Grenville, and with a double share of the unhappy temper, he inherited much of the industry and something of the financial ability of his father. He succeeded in detecting and punishing several instances of great peculation in administration, and he announced to Lord Charlemont his firm intention of reducing ‘that impolitic and unconstitutional influence which has been the bane and ruin of both countries.’ During his government the order of the Knights of Saint Patrick was created, and Charlemont was one of its first members, and a scheme was adopted for establishing in Ireland a colony of refugees from Geneva, who desired to expatriate themselves on account of the aristocratic revolution which had just taken place in that city. It was hoped that they might introduce into Ireland some valuable industries and their excellent system of education, and a sum of 50,000l. was assigned for establishing the settlement at a place near the confluence of the Barrow and the Suir. A few refugees came over, but the plan ultimately failed on a dispute about terms. It is remarkable as showing how little the Irish Government dreaded the introduction into the country of extreme forms of continental democracy, and if it had succeeded it is probable that it would have brought to Ireland some men who bore a conspicuous part in the French Revolution. 1

On the resignation of Shelburne, and the triumph of the coalition of Fox and North, Temple at once resigned his post, and Lord Northington was appointed to succeed him. English politics were, however, for some weeks in a state of extreme uncertainty and confusion, and although the resignation of Temple was sent in on March 12, it was not until June 5 that he was allowed to leave Ireland. He complained bitterly of the delay as a personal injury, and added that it was exercising a most dangerous influence in Ireland. ‘The very uncertain state of Government in England,’ he wrote, ‘has operated very strongly upon Irish Government, by unsettling the confidence and opinions which I have so eagerly laboured to impress.’ ‘The Government of this kingdom suffers by this interregnum to an extent which I cannot describe, and which will materially affect its political situation.’ 1

A dissolution, which immediately followed the arrival of Northington, contributed to maintain the political excitement. It was a significant indication of the relations between the King and his new Ministers, that some of the bishops refused to take the ordinary course of placing their borough patronage at the disposal of the Government; 2 and among the lower classes a very bad harvest, followed by great commercial depression, prepared the way for political disaffection. The last letters of Lord Temple and the early letters of Lord Northington were full of complaints of the intensity of the distress. In November 1782, the Irish Parliament had laid an embargo on the export of corn, flour, and potatoes, and about six months later the Lord Lieutenant complained that in all parts of the kingdom the prices were so high that the industrious poor could barely support their families by their labours. In the North, oatmeal, on which the poor chiefly depended for their food, in a short time trebled in price. A proclamation was issued authorising the Custom-house officers to accept bonds for the high duties imposed by law on foreign corn imported into Ireland, on the understanding that Parliament as soon as it met would pass an Act to cancel these bonds; a bounty was offered for the importation of wheat, oats, and barley, and in several parts of Ireland tumultuous risings interfered with the removal of food. 3

Peace had been signed, but there was no prospect of a dissolution of the volunteer body. The last reviews had been the most splendid hitherto celebrated, and the institution had become a great recognised national militia, discharging many important police functions, and bringing the Protestant gentry and yeomanry into constant connection with each other. An attempt of the Administration under the Duke of Portland to draw off a portion of the volunteer force into some newly organised regiments, called Fencibles, proved very unpopular and met with little success. Constant interchanges of civilities between the volunteers and the ordinary troops marked the high position which the force had attained; and when the new Parliament met in October 1783, another vote of thanks to the volunteers for ‘their spirited endeavours to provide for the protection of their country, and for their ready and frequent assistance of the civil magistrate in enforcing the due execution of the laws,’ was carried through Parliament at the proposal of the Government. 1 The Ministers saw that it was inevitable, and therefore did not wish to lose the credit of proposing it; and among those who disliked the continuance of the volunteers, there were several who were prevented from resigning their posts through fear of being replaced by incendiaries. Grattan and Charlemont had both been made Privy Councillors, but when the volunteers threw themselves into the reform agitation, the relations between the Castle and Charlemont became very cold, and Charlemont was rarely summoned to the meetings of the Council.

Among the measures which were announced in the speech from the throne, were the establishment of a separate post office and Court of Admiralty in Ireland, and at this time the system of annual sessions was introduced. Lord North expressed the strong dislike of the Government in England to this innovation, but Northington urged that it was generally expected in Ireland, and that it appeared to the King's servants both useful and inevitable. It would accelerate decisions upon appeals, which were now confined to the Irish House of Lords. It would prevent delay in adopting any new commercial regulations that might be made in the English Parliament, and it was likely to check the growing habit of provincial meetings, which were justified by the long recesses of Parliament. Supplies were accordingly henceforth voted only for a year. 2

The hostility which the simple repeal question had created between Flood and Grattan became deeper and deeper. The dominant idea of the policy of Grattan at this time was that the public mind should at all hazards be calmed. Ireland, he contended, had passed through a period of violent and convulsive change, and there was great fear lest the fever of political agitation should become inveterate in her system. Nothing could be more fatal to her new-born liberty, than that a body of armed men should constitute themselves permanently into a kind of legislative assembly, should dictate measures to Parliament, should overawe Parliament by scarcely disguised menaces of force. Next to the liberty of their own country, the first object of all true Irish patriots should be the strength and unity of the Empire, and the extinction of all feelings of disloyalty and animosity towards England. The agitation on the simple repeal question had already done much mischief, and it was evident that a very dangerous spirit of restlessness was abroad. A violent and sometimes a seditious press had arisen, and there were agitators who sought to gain popularity, power, and perhaps reputation, by inflaming the public mind against England and against the Parliament, at a time when a great part of the Protestant population were under arms, and when the recent triumphs in America had stimulated the republican elements that were smouldering in Ulster. The example of Flood, and the recent resolutions of the volunteers, had greatly intensified the spirit of disquietude. Irish manufacturers, who found themselves in a period of extreme distress, and overpowered by English competition, began to call loudly for protecting duties. An absentee tax was proposed by Molyneux, and discussed at much length, but it ultimately only found twenty-two supporters. 1 Sir Edward Newenham, an ardent partisan of Flood, introduced, without a shadow of reson, a motion for limiting the supplies to six months. The language used by the volunteers, and by their organs in the press, on the question of parliamentary reform, was much less that of a petition than of a command. There were loud and justifiable complaints of the extravagant management of the finances. The revenue, indeed, it was said, had in two years increased more than three hundred thousand pounds, but there was an annual deficit of about two hundred thousand pounds, and Ireland, which had no national debt in 1755, had now a debt of nearly two millions. 2 The field for retrenchment in the civil administration was very ample, but Flood insisted that the most important retrenchment should be sought in the military department, that in a country like Ireland a peace establishment of 15,000 men was extravagantly and fatally large, that 12,000 men would be amply sufficient, and that the condition of the finances imperatively demanded the reduction. He brought forward the subject again and again with great pertinacity, and it is probable that one leading object of the proposal was to throw the country still more absolutely into the hands of the volunteers.

There was little danger of Parliament adopting these measures, and Flood and his followers were usually supported only by a small minority; but the agitation of such questions greatly increased the disquietude of the public mind. Grattan opposed the proposition for reducing the army with especial vehemence. The magnitude of the Irish army, he said, was Ireland's contribution to the defence of the Empire, and her compensation for the protection she received from the British fleet. The augmentation, under Lord Townshend, was part of a distinct compact which was binding in honour though not in law. It had been made at a time when England possessed America and owed 150 millions less than she owes at present, when Ireland had no trade at all, and when her Constitution was denied. Since then Ireland had regained her Constitution and her commercial liberty; England had conceded to her the vast benefits of the plantation trade, and the Irish Parliament had pledged itself to stand or fall with her. Was this a period in which Ireland, with an augmented revenue, an increased population, and a vastly greater interest in the Empire, could honourably withdraw her old support? 1

The sense of the House was strongly and manifestly on the side of Grattan, and, in the course of the debate, more than one voice urged upon the volunteers the propriety of disbanding. The course adopted by Flood, though it had re-established his popularity with the volunteers, had alienated him from several of his most valuable friends, had produced a strong remonstrance from Charlemont, and had more than once brought him into collision with Grattan. In October 1783, in one of the debates on the proposed reduction of the forces, a violent altercation broke out between Flood and Grattan, and two invectives, both of them disgracefully virulent, and one of them of extraordinary oratorical Power, made all cordial co-operation, for the future, extremely difficult. The interposition of the House prevented a duel. Flood afterwards very magnanimously occupied the chair at a volunteer meeting, when a vote of thanks to Grattan was passed, and Grattan long afterwards, in his pamphlet on the Union, and on many occasions in private conversation, bore a high testimony to the greatness of Flood; but the old friendship of the two leaders was for ever at an end, and words had been spoken which could never be forgiven.

The essentially political attitude which the volunteers were now assuming created much alarm. In July 1783, ‘a committee of correspondence,’ appointed by the delegates assembled at Lisburne for the purpose of arranging the forthcoming meeting at Dungannon, wrote to Charlemont asking his support and advice. They begged him to indicate ‘such specific mode of reform’ as appeared to him most suitable for the condition of Ireland, and at the same time to inform them, whether in his opinion the volunteer assembly should bring within the range of their discussions at Dungannon, such subjects as the propriety of shortening the duration of parliaments, exclusion of pensioners, a limitation of the numbers of placemen, and a tax on absentess. Charlemont perceived with much alarm the disposition of the force to attempt to regulate and perhaps control the whole field of legislation, and he urged the committee to confine themselves to the single question of reform, and on this question to content themselves with asserting the necessity of the measure, leaving the mode of carrying it out, exclusively to the mature deliberation of Parliament. 1

The volunteers could hardly have had a safer counsellor, and Charlemont, though by no means a man of genius, exercised at this time a very great influence in Irish politics. He was now in his fifty-fifth year. He had inherited his title when still a child, and having never gone through the discipline of a public school, had spent more than nine years in travelling on the Continent. For some years he plunged deeply into the dissipations of the lax society in Italy, but he never lost a sense of higher things, and he brought back a great teste and passion for art, a wind range of ornamentat scholarship, and a very real earnestness and honesty of character. At Turin he had formed a close intimacy with Hume, but it had not impaired either his religious principles or his strong Whig convictions. In Paris he had discussed Irish politics very fully with Montesquieu, and was struck with the earnestness with which that great philosopher recommended a legislative union with England as the best safeguard of Irish liberty. He afterwards became an intimate friend of Burke, an early member of that brilliant club which Johnson and Reynolds had formed, a careful and discriminating student of the debates in the English Parliament, and then an almost constant resident in Ireland and a leading figure in Irish politics. A nervousness which he was never able to overcome, and which was aggravated by much ill-health, kept him completely silent in the House of Lords, and in his intimate circle he often showed himself somewhat vain and irresolute and easily offended; but in addition to his great social position, he had personal qualities of a kind which often go further in politics than great brilliancy of intellect, and he was one of the very few prominent Irish politicians who had never stooped to any corrupt traffic with the Government.

Like his contemporary Rockingham he possessed a transparent purity and delicacy of honour, which won the confidence of all with whom he came in contact, a judgment singularly clear, temperate and unbiassed, a natural affability of manner which made him peculiarly fitted to conciliate conflicting interests and characters. He wrote well, though often with a vein of weak sentimentalism which was the prevailing affectation of his time, and he threw himself into many useful national enterprises with great industry, and with invariable singleness of purpose. He was a Whig of Whigs—with all that love of compromise; that cautious though genuine liberality; that combination of aristocratic tastes and popular principles; that dislike to violence, exaggeration, and vulgarity; that profound veneration for the British Constitution, and that firm conviction that every desirable change could be effected within its limits, which characterised the best Whig thought of the time. His property lay in the province which was the centre of the volunteer movement. He was one of the earliest and most active of its organisers, and the unbounded confidence of the more liberal section of the Irish gentry in his penetration and his judgment, had raised him speedily to its head.

His position was, however, now becoming very difficult. Flood and Grattan, with whom he had hitherto most cordially co-operated, were alienated from each other, and both of them were in some degree alienated from him. Though he ultimately admitted the expediency of passing the Act of Renunciation, and though he cordially maintained the necessity of parliamentary reform, he strongly disapproved of the conduct of Flood in raising the first question, and in bringing the second question under the deliberations of an armed body. Grattan had been first brought into Parliament by Charlemont, and a deep attachment subsisted between them; but a coldness had lately grown up which soon culminated in a breach. Grattan was now wholly alienated from the volunteers; he would evidently have gladly seen their dissolution at the peace, and he cordially supported Lord Northington's Administration. Charlemont, on the other hand, was strongly in favour of the maintenance in arms of the volunteer force. He had more and more gravitated to opposition, and he was in consequence rarely consulted by the Administration with which Grattan was in close alliance. Grattan appears to have done everything in his power to soothe the irritation of his friend, and his letters to him are extremely honourable to the writer; but he had to deal with a somewhat fretful and morbid temperament, and he was not able to succeed. At the same time a new democratic and even seditious spirit was rising among the volunteers, with which Charlemont had no sympathy and which it was very doubtful whether he could control, and a very singular rival had lately arisen in the North, who threatened, for a time, to obtain an ascendency in the volunteer body, and to throw the whole of Ireland into a flame.

Frederick Augustus, Earl of Bristol, and Bishop of Derry, was the third son of that Lord Hervey who was long chiefly remembered as the victim of the most savage of all the satires of Pope, but whose reputation has in the present century been greatly raised by the publication of those masterly memoirs in which he had described the Court and politics of George II. His family had been noted for their eccentricity, and a saying attributed to Chesterfield, that God created men, women, and Herveys, has been often repeated. 1 As was frequently the case with the younger sons of great families, he entered the Church without the smallest ecclesiastical leaning; and his eldest brother having been for a few months Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he obtained the promise of an Irish bishopric. In 1767 during the Viceroyalty of Lord Townshend he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He was translated in the following year to the enormously rich bishopric of Derry, and in 1779 he inherited an English earldom and a great fortune. Rich, hospitable, lavishly generous, passionately fond of show and popularity, an exquisite judge of art and by no means destitute of general learning and ability, anxious to search out and to encourage intellectual merit wherever he could find it, 2 and quite capable of playing many different parts with spirit and distinction, he soon made himself one of the most popular men in Ulster. No previous bishop in his diocese had done so much to build, restore, or embellish churches, and he also showed himself extremely liberal and energetic in developing the natural resources of the country. A new bridge over the Foyle was largely due to his energy. He undertook extensive operations in searching for coal. He opened out wild and uncivilised districts in his diocese by roads constructed at his own expense. He built two great palaces, collected pictures and statues, exercised a very liberal hospitality, and took especial pains to place himself on the most friendly terms with the Presbyterians. With the Catholics he was equally friendly. We have already caught some glimpses of the part which he took both at Rome and in Ireland in favour of the earlier Toleration Bill; and it was noticed on the monument that was erected to his memory after his death, that the Roman Catholic bishop and the resident Presbyterian minister at Derry were both among the contributors. 3

His papers have unfortunately perished, and we have no means of ascertaining whether any real change had passed over his character and opinions, which may help to explain the strange want of keeping between the different descriptions or periods of his life. In 1779 Shelburne, who knew Ireland well, spoke in the House of Lords in strong terms of the neglect of duty and the abuse of patronage which were common among the Irish bishops, but he observed that there were a few eminent exceptions—the most remarkable being Primate Robinson and the Bishop of Derry. 1 Charlemont, and Hardy the biographer of Charlemont, though extremely hostile to the Bishop, have both spoken in high terms of the manner in which he distributed his patronage among the oldest and most respectable clergy of his diocese. 2 But the most curious picture of the Bishop, when read in the light of his later career, is that which is furnished by the Journal of Wesley, who, when he came over to Ireland on his evangelical mission, found in Lord Bristol a most cordial supporter. ‘The Bishop,’ writes Wesley, describing a Sunday at Londonderry in 1775, ‘preached a judicious, useful sermon on the blasphemy of the Holy Ghost. He is both a good writer and a good speaker, and he celebrated the Lord's Supper with admirable solemnity.’ A few days later, ‘the Bishop invited me to dinner, and told me, “I know you do not love our hours, and will therefore order dinner to be on table between two and three o'clock.” We had a piece of boiled beef and an English pudding. This is true good breeding. The Bishop is entirely easy and unaffected in his whole behaviour, exemplary in all parts of public worship, and plenteous in good works.’ 3

It is curious to compare this picture with the emphatic judgment of Charlemont, who, while admitting the many generous actions of the Bishop, described him as a bad father, a worse husband, a determined deist, very blasphemous in his conversation, and greatly addicted to intrigue and gallantry; with that of Fox, who described him as a madman, and a dishonest one; with that of Barrington, who delineated him at great length as a brilliant but purely secular and most unscrupulous politician. Jeremy Bentham met him at Bowood in 1781, and described him in his diary in a passage which bears a strong impress of truth. ‘He is a most excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred and liberal-minded to the last degree. He has been everywhere and knows everything.’ He told Bentham that the rectors in his diocese enjoyed incomes of from 250l. to 1,500l. a year, and declared it to be a wonder and a shame that they should be suffered to remain in possession of so much wealth, since scarcely any of them resided, and since they only paid their curates ‘50l. a year, which is their own estimate of what the service done is worth. … He assumed to me,’ continued Bentham, ‘unless I much mistook him, a principal share in the merit of carrying the Toleration Act through the Irish House of Lords. He was, in his own mind at least, for going further and admitting them to all offices, that of member of Parliament not excepted.’ Lord Shelburne, Bentham says, spoke of ‘the flightiness of Lord Bristol, who he says is equally known for his spirit of intrigue and his habit of drawing the long bow. Indeed, there does seem to be something of that in him.’ 1

There were reports that Lord Bristol had been refused the bishopric of Durham, and had even aspired to the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland; but they seem to be attested by no evidence, and it was probably no deeper reason than an uncontrollable love of excitement and of popularity, that produced the strange spectacle of a man, who was at once a great bishop and an English earl, exerting all his energies to enroll and arm Irish volunteers, 2 and endeavouring to bring them into collision with the Irish Parliament and with England. At the assembly of volunteer delegates, which met at Lisburne in July 1783, a committee was appointed to collect information about the state of representation in Ireland, and to correspond with the different reform associations in England; and the general meeting of delegates of the whole province of Ulster, which was held at Dungannon in the ensuing September, passed resolutions leclaring that, a majority of the Irish House of Commons being returned by the mandates of a few peers and commoners, that House was in no sense a representation of the people; that ‘the elective franchise ought of right to extend to all those, and those only, who are likely to exercise it for the public good,’ and that the present imperfect representation, and long duration of Parliament, were intolerable grievances. They at the same time called upon the few representatives of free constituencies to refuse to vote any but short bills of supply, till their grievances were redressed; expressed the warmest sympathy with the English and Scotch reformers, and summoned the volunteers of all four provinces to meet together, to elect a convention of delegates, chosen by ballot from each county in Ireland. This convention was to meet in Dublin on November 10, shortly after Parliament had assembled and while it was still sitting, to frame a plan of reform, and to demand those rights without which ‘the forms of a free nation would be a curse.’

Neither Charlemont nor Flood were present at these proceedings. The first had probably abstained from policy, and the second on account of a passing illness. Colonel Stewart, the member for Tyrone, who was an intimate friend of Charlemont, was in the chair, but the influence of the Bishop appears to have predominated, and he had put himself at the head of the democracy of the North. Being absolutely free from every form of ecclesiastical superstition, and the most emphatic advocate of a wide measure of parliamentary reform, and of the most complete liberality in Church and State, he had become exceedingly popular among the Presbyterians, and in May 1784 a most curious address was presented to him by the Presbytery of Derry, expressing ‘their perfect approbation of the liberality of his Lordship's religious sentiments.’ ‘Christianity,’ they proceed, ‘is liberal, and he is the best disciple of Jesus Christ who possesses the most extensive charity and good-will to the human race. … As ministers of the Gospel of Peace … they rejoice in this opportunity of giving their tribute of deserved praise to a character in every respect so dignified.’ ‘The liberality of sentiment,’ answered the Bishop, ‘which you ascribe to me, flows from the rare consistency of a Protestant bishop, who feels it his duty, and has therefore made it his practice, to venerate in others that inalienable exercise of private judgment which he and his ancestors claimed for themselves. … On the great object which now centres in me the applauses of such various and even contradictory denominations of citizens, I do own to you the very rock which founds my cathedral is less immovable than my purpose to liberate this high-mettled nation from the petulant and rapacious oligarchy which plunder and insult it.’ 1

It was not, however, merely on the Presbyterians that the Bishop relied. One of his leading and most distinctive notions was to bring the Catholic body into active politics, by claiming for them the elective franchise and by inducing them to agitate for it themselves. At the meeting of Dungannon the question was already brought forward, but it was laid aside on account of the strenuous opposition of the friends of Charlemont. 2 From this time, however, it entered into the programme of the more democratic party, and overtures to the Roman Catholics emanating for the most part from Presbyterian sources became frequent. 3

The proposal to hold a volunteer convention in Dublin excited the keenest alarm. It was, in effect, to set up at the doors of the legal Parliament, and at a time when that Parliament was sitting, a rival representative body emanating from and supported by an armed force, and convened for the express purpose of directing or intimidating the Legislature of the nation. Fox wrote with great emphasis, that if such a body were suffered to continue, above all if the smallest concession were made in obedience to its mandates, the freedom of Ireland would be at an end; her boasted Constitution would be replaced by a Government as purely military as that of the Prætorian Guards; demand would follow demand, and complete anarchy would be the inevitable end. 4 At the same time it was almost impossible to prevent the Convention from meeting. The upper classes looked indeed with alarm on the new movement, but the yeomanry of the North were enthusiastic in its favour. Precedents had been established within the last few years, that made it very difficult to condemn it as illegal, and the volunteers had assumed such a position that it was almost impossible to repress them. They were a great and disciplined army comprising all that was best in the Protestant population of Ireland. They had been three times thanked by Parliament. The address of the two Houses of Parliament in 1782 had been carried to the Castle between two lines of volunteers. A succession of Lord-Lieutenants had courted and eulogised them at a time when they were actually interfering in politics, and the Renunciation Act which had just been carried in England was mainly attributed to their influence. To prevent them from now meeting in convention would in the opinion of the Lord-Lieutenant be dangerous, or impossible.

Charlemont was confronted with that question which under different forms and names has constantly pressed upon Irish politicians. All the information from the North showed that it would be perfectly futile to oppose the meeting of the Convention. He had, as we have seen, tried at the outset to limit its functions to that of petitioning for parliamentary reform; but it was extremely doubtful whether the advice would be taken. The question he had to decide was whether he ought to take part in the Convention or to stand aloof from it. In the one case he would countenance and participate in a proceeding which he regarded as dangerous and unconstitutional. In the other case it was tolerably certain that the whole management of the Convention, it was possible that the whole direction of the volunteer force, would fall into the hands of demagogues of the most dangerous type.

Charlemont determined to accept the first alternative, to propose himself, and to induce others of the leading gentry connected with the movement to propose themselves, as candidates for election in the Convention. He has himself stated his motives with great candour. ‘Though I never cordially approved of the meeting, yet, as I found it impossible to withstand the general impulse towards it, … I did not choose to exert myself against it, especially as there was cause to fear my exertions would be fruitless, and if so might prevent my being useful towards moderating and guiding those measures which I could not with efficiency oppose, and directing that torrent which might otherwise have swept down all before it. I had upon mature consideration determined that to render the assembly as respectable as possible was the next best mode to the entire prevention of it.’ 1

The efforts of Charlemont were in a great degree successful. The Convention, he says, formed ‘a truly respectable body of gentlemen, for though some of the lower classes had been delegated, by far the majority were men of rank and fortune, and many of them members of Parliament, Lords and Commons.’ Among the delegates were Charlemont, Flood, and the Bishop of Derry. 2

The Bishop did everything in his power, to aggravate by his conduct the dissension between the Convention and Parliament. He was now accustomed to go about, escorted by a troop of volunteer light cavalry enrolled and commanded by his nephew, George Robert Fitzgerald, a man who about three years later was hanged for a very aggravated murder, and whose history had been already a strange illustration of the utter lawlessness prevailing in some sections of Irish life. He was the son of a gentleman of considerable fortune in the wildest parts of Mayo. His mother, Lady Mary Hervey, once maid of honour to the Princess Amelia, and sister to three successive Earls of Bristol, had been compelled by the gross ill-usage of her husband to seek a separate maintenance, and became in later life a prominent figure in the early Evangelical movement, and an intimate friend of Venn and of Fletcher of Madeley. 3 George Robert, their eldest son, was educated at Eton; he connected himself by marriage with the great families of Leinster and Conolly; travelled on the Continent, was presented at the French Court, wrote both prose and verse with some grace, and concealed under the appearance of a well-bred, polished, and almost effeminate gentleman, a character reckless and savage to the very verge of insanity. He was soon noted as one of the best shots, one of the most desperate duellists, and one of the most arrogant bullies in the West, and a crowd of stories are told of the savage animosity and the brutal insults with which he pursued his enemies, and of the terror which he excited in the wild country in which he lived. Among many other strange freaks, he was accustomed to hunt the fox in the deadest hours of the night, to the terror of the superstitious peasantry, who, as the chase swept by and as the red gleam of the torches flashed through the darkness, imagined that hell had broken loose and that demon hunters were infesting the land. In consequence of a fierce family quarrel he seized upon his father and kept him for five months in strict confinement in his house at Rockfield, under the guard of 200 or 300 ruffians who followed his fortunes, and many of whom had escaped from gaol. Cannon were mounted around the house: all communications were cut off; although the younger brother obtained without difficulty a writ, the sheriff did not dare to execute it, and, at last, when the assizes were being held at Castlebar, George Robert Fitzgerald appeared of his own accord in the court house, and calmly took his place among the grand jurors of the county. The audacity of the proceeding, however, proved too great. The younger brother was present, and at his request the judge ordered the arrest of Fitzgerald, who was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment and to a heavy fine. As was generally expected, he did not lie long in prison. Pistols were conveyed to him. He soon in broad daylight escaped, returned to Rockfield, which lay about three miles from Castlebar, and caused the cannon which defended his house to be fired several times in honour of his release. The younger brother urged upon the sheriff the necessity of executing the writ, but was informed that without the assistance of regular troops such an enterprise was hopeless, and Fitzgerald not only remained at large, but exercised a general terrorism over the whole country.

He soon, however, by his own reckless imprudence, fell within the grasp of the law. About three weeks after his escape from Castlebar he ventured to Dublin in the company of his father, and was there, by the instrumentality of his brother, and on the information of his father, arrested and committed to prison. He obtained a writ of error, but the King's Bench affirmed his sentence, and he lay in confinement for more than eighteen months, when bad health, and influence in high quarters, procured his release. At the end of March 1783, the Attorney-General recommended him for pardon. 1 He appears to have speedily gone to his uncle at Derry, and to have thrown himself actively into volunteering, and in May 1784, little more than a year after his release from prison, through the influence of the Bishop, he was presented with the freedom of the city of Londonderry. 2

Accompanied by the troop of dragoons commanded by this singular personage, the Bishop of Derry entered Dublin in November 1783 in royal state. Dressed entirely in purple, with diamond knee and shoe buckles, and with long gold tassels hanging from his white gloves, he sat in an open landau drawn by six noble horses caparisoned with purple ribands. The dragoons rode on each side of his carriage, which proceeded slowly through the different streets amid the cheers of a large crowd till it arrived at the door of the Parliament House, where a halt was called, and a loud blast of trumpets startled the assembled members. Several wholly ignorant of the cause of the tumult flocked from curiosity to the door, and the Bishop saluted them with royal dignity. The volunteers presented arms; the bands played the Volunteer March; and then, with a defiant blast of trumpets, the procession proceeded on its way. The Bishop was highly elated. He imagmed that he would be elected president of the Convention, and he appears to have entertained a real design of heading a rebellion. ‘We must have blood, my lord, we must have blood!’ he once exclaimed to Lord Charlemont. 3

Fortunately, however, for the peace of the country, the great majority of the Convention, which assembled in Dublin on November 10, were men of a very different stamp from the warlike Bishop. To his great, disappointment Charlemont was elected the chairman, and though the Convention contained some demagogues and incendiaries, it consisted chiefly of country gentlemen of character and position, and contained several experienced and constitutional politicians, who had been induced by Charlemont to offer themselves as delegates for the express purpose of moderating its proceedings, and also some warm friends of the Government, who deliberately laboured to perplex its debates by divided counsels and multiplied propositions. 1 The meeting was first held in the Exchange, but was afterwards adjourned to the Rotunda. Having endeavoured to justify their proceedings by a resolution that, ‘the Protestant inhabitants of this country are required by the statute law to carry arms and have the use of them, and are not by their compliance with the law excluded from the exercise of their civil rights,’ and having asserted in the strongest terms their attachment to the Sovereign and to the Constitution, they proceeded to the great task of drawing up a scheme of parliamentary reform. On the motion of the Bishop of Derry, a committee consisting of one member from each county was appointed to frame a plan for the approbation of the Convention, but little progress was made till, at the suggestion of the same person, Flood, who was not on the committee, was called in as an assessor. His practised eloquence and great constitutional knowledge soon obtained a complete ascendency. The Bishop more than once endeavoured to bring forward the question of the Catholic franchise, but Flood and Charlemont opposed him, and though he met with considerable support he was defeated. 1 A proposition to recommend vote by ballot was rejected after some debate, and at last, after three weeks of deliberation, a very comprehensive plan of reform drawn up by Flood was agreed upon. Charlemont and the five other borough proprietors who sat in the Convention, declared their readiness to surrender their patronage. At length, on November 29, 1783, the preliminary measures being all accomplished, Flood proposed that he and such other members of Parliament as were present, should at once proceed from the Convention to the Parliament, and move for leave to bring in a Bill of reform corresponding to the plan which had been agreed upon, and that ‘the Convention should not adjourn till the fate of the motion was known.’

It would be impossible to assert more strongly the position of the Convention as a kind of rival Legislature, and to bring it more directly into conflict with the Parliament. Charlemont greatly disapproved of the step, and he would gladly have sent down the Volunteer Bill to the different counties to be recommended by public meetings and petitions; but Flood would admit no delay, and his influence, supported by that of the Bishop, swayed the meeting. That night he appeared with several other members of the Convention in the House of Commons, dressed in the uniform of the volunteers, and asked leave to bring in his Reform Bill. In substance, the Volunteer Reform Bill was much less extreme than the schemes of reform which about this time were recommended by the Duke of Richmond and other reformers in England. It proposed to restrict the right of voting, except in the case of electors who possessed freehold or leasehold property of 20l. a year, to men who had actually resided in the constituency six months out of the preceding twelve; to throw open the decayed boroughs by extending their franchise to the neighbouring district; to annul by Act of Parliament the by-laws by which any corporation had contracted the right of franchise; to give votes to all Protestants resident in any city or borough, who possessed freeholds or leaseholds of a specified value and duration; to incapacitate all who held pensions during pleasure from sitting in Parliament; to compel every member of Parliament accepting a pension for life, or any place under the Crown, to vacate his seat and submit to a new election; to oblige all members to swear that they had not given money for their seats; and finally to limit the duration of Parliament to three years.

The prospects of the Bill, however, were soon seen to be hopeless. It asked at least two-thirds of the members of the House of Commons to make a sacrifice of power, privilege, or money, such as no Legislature or ascendant caste has ever consented to make, except under the pressure of extreme necessity or of extreme enthusiasm, and it asked them to do this at a time when they had every motive to strengthen them in their resistance. A large proportion of the Convention, including its president, were notoriously half-hearted, or hostile to its proceedings. Many of the leading patriots of Ireland, and among them the chief author of the Constitution of 1782, were utterly opposed to the meeting of the Convention. The language and conduct of the Bishop of Derry; the Catholic question suddenly thrown into the arena of Irish politics; the violence of a considerable part of the press, had disturbed, irritated, and divided the nation. The natural pride of Parliament was aroused by the encroachment on its prerogative. The elections were just over, and they had on the whole been favourable to the Government, and the Government was inflexibly opposed to all concessions to the Convention. Yelverton, who was Attorney-General, in a speech of great power moved that the House should refuse even to take the Bill into consideration, as it originated with an armed body, and was an attempt to compel Parliament to register the edicts of another assembly, and to receive propositions at the point of the bayonet. Flood answered that he and his colleagues had never mentioned the volunteers. They came as members of Parliament to present a regular Bill in regular form. Would the House receive it from them? Under the Duke of Portland, the House had consented without difficulty to take a Reform Bill into consideration. The anomalies and abuses of the representation were glaring and notorious. Petitions from many counties showed the sense of the nation on the subject. Would Parliament refuse even to inquire into the grievance? He and his friends had not introduced the volunteers into the debate, but as they were introduced, he would not shrink from defending them. He recapitulated with great power their services to the Constitution, reminded the House how largely Parliament in its political struggle had rested upon them, and asked whether it was Parliament or the volunteers who had changed. A positive Act directs that every Protestant in Ireland is to bear arms, and ‘because one man fulfils more of his duty as a citizen than another, should he enjoy less of a citizen's privilege?’

The debate was continued till three in the morning, and it terminated in the House refusing by 157 votes against 77 to receive the Bill. A resolution moved by the Attorney-General, to the effect that it had ‘become necessary to declare that this House will maintain its just rights and privileges against all encroachments whatever,’ and an address to the King moved by Conolly asserting the ‘perfect satisfaction’ of the House with the Constitution and the determination to support it with their lives and fortunes, were then carried. Grattan, in a few conciliatory words, supported the proposition to consider the Bill upon its own merits, but he voted silently for the ensuing resolution. 1

This memorable night gave a fatal blow to the political influence of the volunteers. There were not wanting indeed among them wild spirits who would have gladly pushed matters to extremity, but Charlemont strained his influence to the utmost and succeeded in putting an end to the Convention. The debate in the House of Commons took place on Saturday night, and Charlemont with some difficulty persuaded the Convention, in spite of their previous resolution, to adjourn to the ensuing Monday. On Sunday he held a meeting of his own friends, and they agreed together, that the Convention must be dissolved. On Monday the 1st and on Tuesday the 2nd of December the Convention again met, and Flood fully supported Charlemont in advocating moderation. The Bishop of Derry and Sir Edward Newenham, who represented the more democratic party, were both present, and the debate appears to have been full and dignified. It was agreed to take no formal notice of the recent proceedings in Parliament. A resolution was passed asserting anew the manifest necessity of a parliamentary reform. The delegates agreed to forward the plan of reform adopted by the Convention to their several districts, and to endeavour by public meetings, petitions, instructions to members, and the publication of abuses to obtain for it a great weight of civil support. The Convention then proceeded to adjourn sine die. One of its last acts was an address to the King, which was composed and moved by Flood, and which may be looked upon as its defence before the bar of history. In this remarkable document ‘the delegates of all the volunteers of Ireland’ begged ‘to express their zeal for his Majesty's person, family, and Government, and their inviolable attachment to the perpetual connection of his Majesty's crown of this kingdom with that of Great Britain; to offer to his Majesty their lives and fortunes in support of his Majesty's rights, and of the glory and prosperity of the British Empire; to assert with an humble but an honest confidence that the volunteers of Ireland did, without expense to the public, protect his Majesty's kingdom of Ireland against his foreign enemies at a time when the remains of his Majesty's forces in this country were not adequate to that service; to state that through their means the laws and police of this kingdom had been better executed and maintained than at any former period within the memory of man, and to implore his Majesty that their humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the parliamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union of both kingdoms.’ 1

The Volunteer Convention was peacefully dissolved, but in the March of the following year Flood again brought the Reform Bill before Parliament. It was supported by petitions from twenty-six counties. It was introduced and defended with a moderation that could hardly offend the most sensitive politician, and there was no parade or menace of military force. As might have been expected in a Parliament where the Government was hostile to reform and where more than two-thirds of the members represented nomination boroughs, it was rejected almost with contempt. The House did not, it is true, as on the former occasion refuse leave for its introduction, but it was thrown out on the second reading by a majority of seventy-four. 1 From that time the conviction sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen.

So ended a most unhappy episode in the history of Ireland. The divisions among the reformers had paralysed their force, and in the opinion of the great majority of the best judges, the creation of a Convention and the attempt to dictate measures to Parliament were gross political errors. There have always, however, been a few writers who have in this controversy adopted the side of Flood, who have maintained that if Grattan had not stood aloof and if Charlemont had been truly in earnest, the volunteers might have forced a reform bill through Parliament, and that the transcendant importance of making the Irish Parliament a really representative body outweighed the great danger and evil of the precedent that would have been created. Sir Jonah Barrington, the brilliant Irish historian of the period, adopted this view, and it was strongly supported by another writer whose name will have greater weight with English readers. Jeremy Bentham lived at a time when the recollection of the volunteer movement was still vivid, and he appears to have paid special attention to its history. He described the conduct of the volunteer organisation during five troublous years as one of the very best illustrations in history of the high qualities of patriotism and self-control that are produced in a self-governed democracy. They ‘exalted,’ he said, ‘the average mass of public and private felicity in Ireland to a pitch unknown before or since, and as at once a cause and a consequence of it, public and private virtue.’ ‘Commercial emancipation and parliamentary emancipation united the wishes of almost everybody … and nothing could be more evident than that but for the armed association they never could have been accomplished.’ The pressure of the Convention, he thinks, was ‘the only means by which any constitutional reform could have been effected,’ and he attributes it wholly to the half-heartedness of Charle-mont, of Grattan and their party, that ‘Mr. Grattan's great and worthy rival Flood’ did not succeed in carrying reform.’ 1

The question is not susceptible of any positive solution, and the difficulties on all sides seemed nearly insuperable. The experience of all countries shows that a monopoly of power, as complete as that which was possessed by a small group of borough owners in Ireland, is never, or scarcely ever, broken down except by measures bordering on revolution. The Reform Bill of 1832 would never have been carried, but for an agitation which convinced the most enlightened statesmen that the country could not be peacefully governed on any other condition. Yet the English monopoly before 1832 was but a faint shadow of that Irish Parliament, in which more than two-thirds of the representatives were nominated by individual patrons, and a majority were dependent on a few great families. Corruption ever follows monopoly as the shadow the substance, and where political power was concentrated in so few hands, party management necessarily resolved itself into personal influence. The Protestant yeomanry of the North, and the great bulk of the Protestant gentry, found themselves either unrepresented or most inadequately represented; and these classes, who comprised most of the intelligence, and a great preponderance of the property, of the country, mainly constituted at this time both the volunteers and the reformers of Ireland. 2

To create popular, but at the same time purely Protestant, institutions was the aim of Charlemont and Flood, and the whole history of the volunteer organisation appears to me to show that the ascendant caste had attained a level of political intelligence and capacity which fully fitted it for increased political power. Beyond this Flood and Charlemont refused to go. To place political power in the hands of the vast, ignorant, and turbulent Catholic peasantry would, they maintained, be an act of madness which would imperil every institution in the country, shake property to its very basis, and probably condemn Ireland to a long period of anarchy. I have already quoted the remarkable letter, in which as late as 1791 Charlemont predicted that a full century was likely to elapse before the mass of the Irish Catholics could be safely entrusted with political power; 1 and in his comments on the proceedings of the Convention of 1783, he expressed his views on the subject with great clearness. ‘Every immunity,’ he wrote, ‘every privilege of citizenship should be given to the Catholics excepting only arms and legislation, either of which being granted them would, I conceive, shortly render Ireland a Catholic country, totally break its connection with England,’ and force it to resort to the protection of France or Spain. 2 Flood, as we have seen, held very similar opinions, and it appears to have been partly in order to divert the volunteers from taking up the Catholic question that he pushed on so strenuously the question of reform. A democracy planted in an aristocracy, popular institutions growing out of an intelligent and ascendant class, formed their ideal, and the memory of ancient Athens with its democracy of 30,000 free citizens rising above a vast population of unrepresented slaves was probably present to many minds.

Such a reform, they maintained, would have at least placed the Irish Parliament on a secure basis, made it a real representative of the intelligence and property of Ireland, put an end to the inveterate system of corruption, and called the action of party government into full and healthy play. The result may appear to show that it would have been wise at almost any hazard, and without any delay, if possible, to have at this time forced a large infusion of the popular element into Parliament, but the result is a less decisive test than is often thought of the wisdom of statesmen. Politics are little more than a calculation of probabilities, and the train of events which appears reasonably the most probable does not always occur. If the course of the world for fifty years after 1782 had been as peaceful as it had been during the first three quarters of the century, reforms might probably have been introduced by slow steps, and no great catastrophe would have occurred. Mere political difficulties and ordinary wars had never seriously affected the loyalty and the peace of the country. The American Revolution with its direct and evident bearing on the relations of dependencies to the mother country was the first contest which acted powerfully upon opinion, and even its influence was of a very sober, measured, and rational kind. Unfortunately for the peace of Ireland, before the close of the century an event occurred which in its immediate moral and political effects was wholly unequalled since the great religious convulsions of the sixteenth century. The fierce spirit of democracy, which the French Revolution had engendered, swept like a hurricane over Europe, lashed into sudden fury popular passions which had slumbered for centuries, and strained to the utmost every beam in the Constitution. Six or seven quiet years were granted to Ireland after her legislative emancipation to prepare for the storm, but when the first blast was felt, nothing had as yet been done, and the Parliament was as far as ever from a real representative of the nation.

I do not propose to examine the history of those years in very minute detail, and shall be content if I can sketch their general characteristics. In England another great revolution of power had taken place, which was destined to exercise a great influence in Ireland. The Coalition Ministry had fallen. Pitt came into power with an irresistible majority, and in February 1784 Lord Northington left Ireland, and the Duke of Rutland succeeded him as Viceroy, with Thomas Orde as his Chief Secretary. For some months after the dissolution of the Convention a dangerous agitation might be discerned. ‘A rage for supporting the Convention,’ wrote one of Charlemont's best informed correspondents, ‘has laid hold on the yeomanry.’ 1 The northern prints were full of passionate addresses, and the Bishop of Derry in emphatic language urged the volunteers to make the political emancipation of the Catholics one of their first objects. 2 The Government, alarmed at his proceedings, for a time contemplated the possibility of prosecuting him, and induced a gentleman from the neighbourhood of Derry to attach himself to him as a spy in order to learn his intentions, and to discover whether it was true, as they suspected, that he was importing arms from Birmingham. 3

The distress which had been so severe in 1783 still continued. In the beginning of 1784 a proclamation was issued forbidding the export of oats, oatmeal, and barley, and Irish letters continually speak of food risen almost to famine prices; of great multitudes of workmen unemployed; of riots to prevent the transport of food from one part of the country to another; of non-importation agreements; illegal combinations of workmen; industry in all its forms lamentably depressed. The cry for protecting duties became louder and louder, and in February an amendment pointing to them was moved by Sir Edward Newenham in the discussion on the address. It was rejected without a division, but Rutland wrote that ‘the most difficul subject which is likely to be introduced is that of the protecting duties, which is much more earnestly called for from the distresses which are brought upon the poor, and especially the manufacturers, by the extraordinary inclemency of the season.’ 4 Gardiner, one of the members for Dublin, who was aggrieved with the Government because they had not given him a peerage which had been promised, 1 placed himself at the head of the movement, and he was afterwards supported by Flood.

Resolutions in favour of protecting duties were more than once introduced, and the question was debated at great length, and with great ability. It was argued that Irish industries could never really flourish unless Parliament adopted the policy of giving native manufactures a decided preference in the home market. History, the supporters of the resolutions said, proved that England and France, and every other country which was at liberty to pursue its own interest, had uniformly pursued this plan, and they only asked the Irish Parliament to follow the example of Great Britain herself,’ of all her wise ministers and of all her wise Parliaments since the Revolution.’ A poor country could never, without protective duties, compete even in her domestic market with a far more wealthy neighbour. The long-established manufactures of England could always undersell the unprotected industries of Ireland. Great capitalists could easily afford some temporary loss in order to drive feebler rivals from the field, and the English manufacturer was ready to give two years’ credit, while the Irish trader could not give more than six months. The Irish woollen manufacture, which England had formerly so absolutely suppressed, had been in some small degree revived since the more liberal legislation of the last few years; but in spite of the peculiarly excellent quality of Irish wool, it was impossible to maintain it, for while prohibitory laws still excluded Irish wool from the English market, an overwhelming English competition crushed it at home. ‘The only way to serve the manufacturers of Ireland was to put them on an equal footing with the English artists, to lay such duties on the import of woollens as might serve to counterbalance the great capitals of the English, the low price of their wool, and their great exactness in furnishing goods.’ Prohibitory duties were not asked, and the demand was not made in any spirit of hostility to England. It arose ‘from a commiseration for the distresses of the wretched inhabitants of the country, and not from any party spirit or factious motive whatsoever.’ The primary cause of the prevailing distress is to be found ‘in a radical error of our commercial system, which nothing but the interference of the Legislature can effectually remove.’ ‘England has flourished from adopting protecting duties, and Ireland has sunk by neglect of them.’ ‘Will any man in this House refuse to put the Irish manufacturer upon an equal footing with the Englishman? Is it possible that so just, so equitable a proposition can be rejected?’

Such arguments, urged at a time of acute commercial distress, and supported by the example of nearly every country in Europe, and by numerous petitions from the manufacturing classes, could hardly fail to have much influence on opinion, but the demand was strenuously resisted. Foster, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who led the opposition, urged that the prevailing distress was much more local, and much more due to temporary causes than had been said; that the effect of protective duties would be, that Irish manufactures would deteriorate in quality and increase in price; that the measure the House was asked to adopt would inevitably throw England into an attitude of hostility, and produce reprisals, and that the probable result of such reprisals would be the total ruin of the principal industry of Ireland. The Irish linen manufacture mainly depended on the English market. The immense importance of that market was shown by the fact that while the whole value of English manufactures imported into Ireland was less than one million, Irish linens alone exported to England were valued at a million and a half. 1 England encouraged them by a small bounty, but this was a trifling matter and might be easily replaced. She assisted the manufacture much more effectually by admitting it to her market duty free. This was her compensation for the many Irish industries she had suppressed and excluded, and if this liberty were withdrawn the effects would be most calamitous. England would transfer her linen trade to Germany, and Irish linen would be excluded by heavy duties from her market, as it already was from the chief markets on the Continent.

These arguments did not convince the manufacturers, and it was remarked that none of the linen manufacturers opposed the petition for protecting duties, while some of the most considerable actively supported it, maintaining that the country was likely to gain more by moderate duties than she could suffer from any proceeding which Great Britain could find it her interest to take. 1 The political dangers of entering into a commercial contest with England were probably more keenly felt, and the resolutions in favour of protecting duties were rejected by overwhelming majorities. The House of Commons, however, felt that something must be done to meet the wishes of the distressed manufacturers, and that a future conflict with England on commercial questions could only be averted by a commercial arrangement on the basis of reciprocal advantages. After some discussion, an address to the King was unanimously voted on May 13, 1784, in which, after warm protestations of gratitude and loyalty, the House expressed their hope ‘that the interval between the close of the present session and the beginning of the next, will afford sufficient opportunity for forming a wise and well-digested plan for a liberal arrangement of commercial intercourse between Great Britain and Ireland to be then brought forward,’ and added ‘that his faithful Commons humbly beg leave to assure his Majesty that such a plan, formed upon the broad basis of reciprocal advantage, would be the most effectual means of strengthening the Empire at large, and cherishing the common interest and brotherly affection of both kingdoms.’ 2

This address had afterwards important consequences. Some new bounties on manufactures were about the same time granted, and a measure was taken which exercised an influence of the most powerful kind on Irish agriculture. Foster's Corn Law of 1784, granting large bounties on the exportation of corn and imposing heavy duties on its importation, is one of the capital facts in Irish history. In a few years it changed the face of the land, and made Ireland to a great extent an arable instead of a pasture country.

I have devoted, in a former volume, a considerable space to the causes and effects of the immense predominance of pasture in Ireland during the earlier years of the century. The great and dominant cause was, I believe, that nature has made Ireland a supremely good pasture country, while as a wheat-growing country it is much below the average of Europe; but there were, as we have seen, many subsidiary causes strengthening the tendency. Such were the penal laws; the political and social insecurity which made landlords prefer the simplest type of property; the bad farming which was prevalent; the unjust exemption of pasture from the burden of tithes; the fact that the bulk of the population, and that section which increased most rapidly, lived not upon bread but upon potatoes. It was also a very important consideration that England, till near the close of the century, was a wheat-exporting country. Ireland could find no steady market there, for, except in years of great scarcity, importation was discouraged by heavy duties, and in good years English corn, encouraged by the large English bounty on exportation, and checked by no duty in Ireland, flowed in, in overwhelming quantities, and beat down the price of native corn.

The evils of this state of things were peculiarly felt on account of the great want of manufactures. In the eighteenth, as in the nineteenth century, the main economical evil of Ireland was the small number of its productive industries. The great want of a variety of employments had thrown the population to an unhealthy degree for subsistence on the soil, and pasture could only support a much smaller population than tillage. Several laws had already been passed, chiefly in periods of great distress, for the encouragement of tillage, but most of them were perfectly inefficient. English influence dominated in Irish legislation, and would suffer no measure that could interfere with the English corn trade, and Irish landlords, for the reasons I have mentioned, had a general leaning towards pasture. Some bounties on exportation were granted in 1707, but they were far smaller than those in England, and they only came into operation when the price had sunk to a level which it scarcely ever reached. They were slightly increased in 1756, in 1765, and in 1774, but were still too low to have any considerable effect. The Act of 1729, making it compulsory to till five acres in every hundred, was little more than a dead letter, and no great result can have followed from the Act of 1765, which offered premiums to the landlords and farmers in each county who had the largest quantities of corn on stands four feet high, and with flagstones at the top. Some considerable effect in stimulating tillage is, however, said to have been produced by those curious Acts which offered bounties on the inland carriage, and a few years later on the carriage, by the coast, of corn to Dublin; and under these Acts, 882,149l. was paid in bounties between 1762 and 1784. 1 But the great and decisive impulse towards tillage in Ireland was not produced until the memorable law of Foster, which was modelled on the English corn laws, as they had existed since the Revolution. It granted a bounty of 3s. 4d. a barrel on the export of wheat as long as the home price was not above 27s. a barrel; and other very considerable bounties on the exportation of flour, barley, rye, oats, and peas; and it at the same time laid a duty of 10s. a barrel on imported wheat when the home price was under 30s.; and a number of other duties, varying according to the home price, on the importation of the other articles that have been mentioned. 2

As I have already observed, the value of corn bounties was one of the points on which the opinions of the eighteenth century differed most widely from those of our own generation. In Ireland it was the almost unanimous belief of all the most competent authorities towards the close of the century, that the corn bounties of Foster had proved an inestimable benefit to the nation. Newenham, who of all writers has most fully examined the economical condition of Ireland in the period we are considering, described Foster's Act as incomparably the most beneficent Irish measure of the eighteenth century, and as especially, and in the highest degree, beneficial to the small farmers and labourers. From that time, he maintains, acute distress in Ireland ceased; 3 manufactures flourished in consequence of increased profits in agriculture; and while population rapidly angmented, the well-being of all classes steadily rose. 1 These views appear to have been very generally held, and the corn bounties received the warm and almost unanimous approbation of Parliament. It is impossible, indeed, to question the magnitude of the change that followed them. Vast pasture lands were rapidly broken up into small tillage farms; corn mills were erected in every quarter of the land, and a great corn trade was produced. The quantity of corn, meal, and flour exported in twelve years after the passing of the Act exceeded that which was exported in the eighty-four years that preceded it. Its value in ten years after 1785 was about four millions and a quarter. 2 The large number of farmers who held leases for life or for a considerable period, that had not yet expired, made great and sudden gains, and there was a rapid rise in the rental of land. Newenham, writing in 1808, expressed his belief ‘that since the year 1782 the rent of land, which a short time before that year had begun to fall in many places, has been much more than doubled in all parts of Ireland one with another, more than trebled in many; and that the greatest rise has been in those counties where tillage has been most pursued;’ while the average price of agricultural labour, which was only 6 1/2d. when Arthur Young visited Ireland, had risen in the next thirty years to 10 1/2d. Foster's Act, he says, ‘may fairly be considered as the great primary cause of the unprecedented increase of wages that has taken place in Ireland since the year 1778.’ 3

Modern economists of the school of Adam Smith, will probably refuse to attribute to the corn bounties the undoubted progress and prosperity of Irish agriculture in the last sixteen years of the century, and will point to other causes which made tillage at that time unusually profitable. It may, however, I think, be truly claimed for Foster's Act, that in a country where there was very little capital and enterprise, it turned agriculture decisively and rapidly in this profitable direction. It was enacted at the time when the growth of the manufacturing population in England had begun to press heavily on the nation's means of subsistence. England ceased to be a wheat-exporting country. Her vast market was thrown open to Irish corn, and a few years later the great French War raised the price of wheat almost to a famine rate and made the profits of corn culture proportionately large.

It is quite true that a great and sudden increase of prosperity is never likely to be a permanent benefit to an improvident and uneducated people. The corn bounties appear to have contributed largely to that excessive subdivision of farms which became ultimately so disastrous; to modes of cultivation which, in order to obtain large and speedy returns, exhausted and impoverished the soil; to an increase of population out of all proportion to the permanent resources of the country. 1 The artificial system which turned into a wheat-growing country a land which nature had intended for pasture was necessarily transient, and with the great fall of prices that followed the peace and with the subsequent adoption by England of the policy of Free Trade the whole economical condition of Ireland was again changed. But during the closing years of the eighteenth century, legislation and circumstances had undoubtedly combined to give an immense impulse to agriculture, and on agriculture more than on any other single influence the prosperity of Ireland depended.

These results, however, were not immediately attained, and the rejection of the protecting duties in 1784 at first produced considerable disturbances. Rutland had soon to report a long series of outrages in the metropolis of the most dangerous kind. The soldiers were more than once called in to repress them, and they became the objects of fierce popular animosity. Several were brutally houghed by butchers in the streets, and the crime assumed such dimensions that a special Act was passed to make the offence capital, and to throw the support of the wounded soldiers on the district if the culprit was not detected. 1 Many tradesmen or artisans, who had imported English goods, or worked at low wages or in branches of manufacture to which they had not been bred, or who had come up from the country to work in Dublin when Dublin workmen were on strike, were tarred and feathered after the American fashion or otherwise ill-used. On one occasion a man, who had been concerned in some of these outrages, being publicly whipped, the mob attacked the soldiers on guard, who fired, killed one man, and wounded several others. On another a threatening mob burst into the gallery of the House of Commons, and it was necessary to call in soldiers to eject them. On a third the Duke of Rutland was hooted in a theatre. A paving Act, which was supposed to press heavily on the poorer ratepayers, was the cause, or, as the Government believed, the pretext, of new disturbances. Houses were attacked, members of Parliament were insulted, threatening letters became very common, and a press of the most savage and seditious nature had arisen. One paper, called ‘The Volunteer's Journal,’ was especially conspicuous for its scarcely disguised advocacy of assassination, and three men were actually arrested on a charge of being concerned in a conspiracy for assassinating seven members of Parliament, who were conspicuous in opposing protecting duties. With inefficient watchmen, timid magistrates, and a fierce mob, these outrages passed almost unpunished. There were vague rumours, resting on no real evidence, that French influence was concerned in them, and that officers of the Irish brigade in the French service had secretly come over to Ireland. It was, however, the firm conviction of the Lord-Lieutenant that some of the ‘master manufacturers’ were at the bottom of the outrages, and that considerable sums had been subscribed to foster them. 2

They appear to have been almost exclusively confined to Dublin. In April, Rutland, while describing their magnitude, added, ‘I have the satisfaction at the same time to find that the country is in a perfect state of quiet. The judges have finished their circuits, and at no place whatsoever did the grand juries show any spirit of discontent or any attempt at innovation. I hear of violence nowhere but in the metropolis.’ 1 Even in Dublin the disturbances, though for a time very serious, in a few months subsided, and a Press Bill, which was introduced by Foster, did much to check them. It provided that the true names of every newspaper proprietor must be registered; made receiving or offering money for printing or forbearing to print libels a high misdemeanour, and prevented the sale of unstamped papers in the streets. 2 Towards the close of the year, however, the Whiteboy disturbances broke out again with great violence in the county Kilkenny and spread widely over several counties.

An incident, which occurred in Dublin in the spring of 1784, added seriously to the alarm. The ‘Liberty’ corps of the volunteers—so called because it was recruited in the Earl of Meath's liberties, where the woollen manufacturers chiefly dwelt—thought fit without consulting any other volunteers to advertise for recruits, and enlisted about two hundred of the lowest class, who were chiefly Roman Catholics. Such a proceeding was wholly contrary to the wishes of Charlemont, to the general custom of the volunteers, and to the law which forbade Catholics to carry arms without licence, and at a time when the spirit of outrage was so rife in Dublin it was peculiarly dangerous. The other corps of the volunteers marked their disapprobation by refusing to join the Liberty corps at their exercises; but neither the Government nor the leaders of the volunteers ventured to take the decisive step of disarming the new recruits, and the example of Catholic enlistment began to spread. 3

The change, indeed, which was now taking place in the character of the volunteer body, was especially alarming. The original volunteers had consisted of the flower of the Protestant yeomanry, commanded by the gentry of Ireland, and in addition to their services in securing the country from invasion in a time of great national peril, they had undertaken to preserve its internal peace, and had discharged with admirable efficiency the functions of a great police force. But after the signature of peace, and, again, after the dissolution of the Volunteer Convention, a great portion of the more respectable men connected with the movement considered their work done and retired from the ranks, and they were being replaced by another and wholly different class. The taste for combining, arming, and drilling had spread, and had descended to the lower strata of society. Demagogues had arisen who sought by arming and organising volunteers to win political power, and who gathered around them men who desired for very doubtful purposes to obtain arms. Grattan, who at all times dreaded and detested anything that withdrew political movements in Ireland from the control and guidance of the gentry, was one of the first to denounce the change. ‘I would now draw the attention of the House,’ he said, ‘to the alarming measure of drilling the lowest classes of the populace. … The old, the original, volunteers had become respectable because they represented the property of the nation, but attempts had been made to arm the poverty of the kingdom. They had originally been the armed property of Ireland. Were they to become the armed beggary?’ ‘The populace,’ he added, ‘differ much and should be clearly distinguished from the people,’ and he spoke of the capital that has been drained, the manufacturers who have been deterred, the character of the nation that has been sunk by indiscriminate arming, and by the establishment of representative bodies unconnected with Parliament. 1

The debates of this year furnish many illustrations of the growing evil. One speaker complained that men whom the old volunteers emphatically repudiated, and with whom they refused in any way to associate, ‘men of no property and of every persuasion,’ were of their own authority forming themselves into separate armed corps. In Kerry, men calling themselves volunteers beat off one of his Majesty's sloops of war with their small arms, and in many places men assuming the same name were in receipt of daily pay. Another speaker stated that in some of the recent Dublin riots volunteers had remained absolutely passive, and refused when summoned to assist the civil power. A third had seen two sergeants, in back parts of Dublin, drilling two parties of seventy or eighty ragged and dangerous-looking ruffians, and when he accosted them he found that they were acting entirely on their own authority, being determined, as they told him, that when a rebellion or disturbance broke out, they would have armed men at their command. Fitzgibbon, who was now Attorney-General, said that the great majority of the original volunteers had hung up their arms and retired to cultivate the arts of peace, and that their places were often taken by men of the worst character. He asserted that one corps, called the ‘Sons of the Shamrock,’ had voted every Frenchman of character an honorary member, and that he had himself seen resolutions inviting the French to Ireland, and enthusiastic eulogies of Lewis XVI. It was reported that officers of the Irish brigade in the French service had come over to engage volunteers. The law forbidding Catholics to carry arms without licence had hitherto been enforced, and it was regarded even by the Catholic gentry as of vital importance to the peace of the country, for while the more respectable Catholics readily obtained licences, it gave the Government the power of restraining, in a very lawless and turbulent country, the great masses of the rabble from the possession of arms. But now, under the colour of volunteering, and in direct defiance, not only of the letter of the law, but also of the wishes of the commander of the volunteers, an extensive and indiscriminate arming of Catholics was going on, and the Lord-Lieutenant complained that great quantities of arms were being scattered through the very lowest section of the population. 1 In Ulster, it is true, the volunteers retained much of their primitive character, and Charlemont for many years presided at their annual reviews; but in other parts of the country, and especially in Dublin, the change was very marked. In a letter written in 1793, Charlemont, while deploring the shameful and utter degradation of the Dublin volunteers, incidentally mentioned that though he was still their nominal commander, they had, for many years past, in no one instance asked his advice, nor had they ever taken it when it was offered. 1

The disquiet caused by these things was very evident. In the House it was frequently expressed, and when a partisan of the volunteers recalled the former votes of thanks to the volunteers, and proposed another similar vote, Gardiner moved an amendment, which was strongly supported by Grattan and carried by a great majority, expressing high approbation of those who since the conclusion of the war had retired to cultivate the blessing of peace. 2 The letters of the Lord-Lieutenant for some time showed the anxiety with which he regarded the continuance of the volunteer movement and especially the arming of Catholics. The creation of a purely Protestant militia was the favourite remedy, but both the English and Irish Governments agreed that an attempt to disarm or even to prohibit the volunteers would be extremely dangerous, and that it was best to trust to the probability that in times of peace they would dwindle away. 3 The prevision was on the whole justified; in a few years complaints on the subject almost ceased; but a portion of the volunteers were still in arms when the French Revolution called all the disaffected elements in Ireland into activity.

By far the greater part of the disturbances of 1784 and 1785 were probably due to no deeper cause than commercial depression acting upon a very riotous population, and with the return of prosperity they gradually ceased; but there was a real and dangerous element of political agitation mixing with the social disquietude. The decisive rejection of Flood's Reform Bill, in spite of the many petitions in its favour, and the refusal of the House of Commons to impose protective duties stimulated political agitation, and the question of the Catholic franchise now began to rise into prominence. Several of the opponents of Flood's Reform Bill had made the omission of the Roman Catholics an argument against it; 1 and some of its supporters accused the Government of raising the Catholic question in order to divide and weaken the reformers. 2 On the other hand a democratic party had arisen, who, following the advice of the Bishop of Derry, contended that the best way of breaking down the power of the aristocracy and carrying parliamentary reform was to offer the franchise to the Catholics, and thus enlist the great body of the nation in the agitation. Dr. Richard Price the eminent Nonconformist minister who was so prominent among the reformers in England, wrote to the volunteers, ‘I cannot help wishing that the right of voting could be extended to papists of property in common with Protestants;’ and Todd Jones, one of the members for Lisburne, published a letter to his constituents strongly advocating the measure. In July 1784 an address in this sense was presented to Lord Charlemont by the Ulster volunteers who were reviewed at Belfast, but Charlemont in his reply, while reiterating his adhesion to parliamentary reform, pronounced himself strongly against Catholic suffrage. 3

In Dublin a small knot of violent and revolutionary reformers, chiefly of the shopkeeper class, had arisen, and some of them were members of the Corporation. Napper Tandy, the son of an ironmonger in the city, was the most conspicuous, and he afterwards rose to great notoriety. By the exertions of this party, meetings in favour of reform were held in Dublin. A permanent committee was created, and in June 1784 this committee invited the sheriffs of the different counties to call meetings for the purpose of electing delegates to meet in Dublin in the ensuing October. This was an attempt to revive in another form the convention of the previous year, with this great distinction, that it was to have no connection with any armed force, but was to be a true representative of the Irish Protestants. In many quarters the idea was accepted with alacrity, and the Government did not distinctly challenge the legality of the congress; but Fitzgibbon, by a strained and unusual construction of law, treated the conduct of the high sheriff of the county of Dublin, in summoning a meeting to elect delegates, as a contempt of the Court of King's Bench; proceeded against him before that court by the method of ‘attachment,’ and without the intervention of a jury caused him to be condemned to a small fine. The legality of this proceeding was much disputed by Flood, and by lawyers in the Parliaments both of England and Ireland. Erskine was consulted on the subject, and he wrote a remarkable letter in which he asserted that the conduct of the King's Bench judges was such a gross and daring usurpation that it would justify their impeachment, and that the precedent, if acquiesced in, would be in the highest degree fatal to liberty in both countries. 1

The feeling in favour of reform continued to be very strong throughout the country, and it was accompanied with great irritation against the majority in Parliament. The prediction of Flood that without a reform of Parliament there was no security for the stability of the present Constitution, and that a corrupt majority might one day overturn it, had sunk deeply in the popular mind, and petitions to the King poured in from many quarters, describing the House of Commons as having wholly lost the confidence of the nation and fallen completely into the hands of a corrupt oligarchy. One petition which came from Belfast 2 attracted special notice from its openly revolutionary character. It stated that the majority was ‘illegally returned by the mandates of Lords of Parliament and a few great Commoners, either for indigent boroughs where scarcely any inhabitants exist or for considerable towns where the elective franchise is unjustly confined to a few … that the House of Commons is not the representative of a nation, but of mean and venal boroughs … that the price of a seat in Parliament is as well ascertained as that of the cattle of the fields,’ and that although the united voice of the nation had been raised in favour of a substantial reform, yet ‘the abuse lying in the very frame and disposition of Parliament itself, the weight of corruption crushed with ignominy and contempt the temperate petitions of the people.’ Under these circumstances, said the petitioners, the repeated abuses and perversion of the representative trust amounted to a virtual abdication and forfeiture in the trustees, and they had summoned ‘a civil convention of representatives to be freely chosen by every county and city and great town in Ireland … with authority to determine in the name of the collective body on such measures as are most likely to re-establish the Constitution on a pure and permanent basis.’ They accordingly asked the King to dissolve the Parliament and ‘to give efficacy to the determination of the convention of actual delegates, either by issuing writs agreeably to such plan of reform as shall by them be deemed adequate, or by co-operating with them in other steps for restoring the Constitution.’

In such language it is easy to recognise the strong democratic fervour which was arising in the North, but the gentry of Ireland had in general no sympathy with such views, and although, in spite of all obstacles, the congress met in October 1784, and again in the following January, it proved to be a body of very little importance. Nearly all the more important persons either openly discountenanced it or only consented to be elected in order to keep out more dangerous men. Sir Edward Newenham, a warm partisan of Flood, a strong advocate of parliamentary reform, and also a strong opponent of Catholic suffrage, seems to have been the most prominent of its active members. The Bishop of Derry did not attend. Flood only appeared once. The Catholic question speedily divided the members, and little resulted from the congress except some declamatory addresses in favour of parliamentary reform which had very little effect upon opinion.

It is a question of much difficulty whether the Catholics themselves took any considerable part in these agitations. For a long period an almost death-like torpor hung over the body, and though they formed the great majority of the Irish people they hardly counted even in movements of opinion. Even when they were enrolled in volunteer corps there were no traces of Catholic leaders. There was, it is true, still a Catholic committee which watched over Catholic interests; Lord Kenmare and a few other leading Catholics were in frequent communication with the Government; two or three Catholic bishops at this time did good service in repressing Whiteboyism, and Dr. Troy, who was then Bishop of Ossory, received the warm thanks of the Lord-Lieutenant, 1 but for the most part the Catholics stood wholly apart from political agitation. The well-known Father O'Leary indeed had one day visited the Volunteer Convention in 1788 and had been received with presented arms and enthusiastic applause, and one of the corps had even given him the honorary dignity of their chaplain. 2 In the same Convention when the Bishop of Derry brought forward the question of Catholic suffrage a strange and very scandalous episode occurred. Sir Boyle Roche, a member of Parliament who was well known for his buffoonery, but who was also a prominent and a shrewd debater, closely connected with the Government and chamberlain at the Castle, rose and asserted that Lord Kenmare having heard that the question was about to be raised had sent through him a message explicitly disavowing on the part of the Catholics any wish to take part in elections. Such a communication at such a time had naturally great weight, but it was speedily followed by a resolution from the Catholic Committee declaring that it was totally unknown to them, and a few days later by a letter from Lord Kenmare stating that no such message had been sent, and that the use of his name was entirely unauthorised. Sir Boyle Roche afterwards explained that he considered the conduct of the Bishop and his associates so dangerous that ‘the crisis had arrived in which Lord Kenmare and the heads of the Catholic body should step forth to disavow those wild projects and to profess their attachment to the lawful powers.’ Unfortunately Lord Kenmare and most of the other leading Catholics were at this time far from Dublin, and therefore, ‘authorised only by a knowledge of the sentiments of the persons in question,’ he considered himself justified in inventing the message. It is a strange illustration of the standard of political honour prevailing in Ireland that a man who, by his own confession, had acted in this manner continued to be connected with the Government and a popular speaker in the House of Commons. 1

It was true, however, that Lord Kenmare and several other prominent Catholics were not favourable to the Convention, that their influence was uniformly exerted against political agitation, and that on this ground many of their co-religionists were beginning to desert them. 2 The question of giving votes to the Catholics was first raised with effect by an Anglican bishop and by some Presbyterian agitators, but there is reason to believe that in Dublin Catholics were being slowly drawn into the vortex. A few years later, as we shall see, they were numerous among the followers of Napper Tandy, and as early as 1784 the Irish Government attributed most of the disturbances to French instigation, and a large proportion of the seditious writing to Popish priests. 3 It is now impossible to ascertain how far such suspicions were justified. For some months a panic prevailed which made men very credulous. A thousand rumours, as the Chief Secretary himself said, filled the air. False testimony was very common. None of the reports that reached the Castle appear to have been tested in the law courts, and in a short time all serious alarm had passed away. It is, however, antecedently probable that the contagion of political agitation was not unfelt in the Catholic body, and that they were not insensible to the overtures of the democratic party. The Government at least thought so, and they sent over two or three spies to Ireland to ascertain the secret sentiments of the Catholics. There is grave reason to believe that among these spies was a man whose literary and social gifts had given him a foremost place among the Irish Catholics and whose character ranked very high among his contemporaries. Father O'Leary, whose brilliant pen had already been employed to vindicate both the loyalty and the faith of the Catholics and to induce them to remain attached to the law, appears to have consented for money to discharge an ignominious office for a Government which distrusted and despised him. 1

It may, however, I think, be confidently stated that the suspicion of the Government that French influence was at the bottom of the disturbances in Ireland, and that an agent connected with the French ambassador was directing them, was without foundation. For several years, it is true, foreign statesmen had given some slight and intermittent attention to Irish affairs. We have already seen this in the case of Vergennes, 1 and in the correspondence of Lord Charlemont there is a curious letter from St. Petersburg written by Lord Carysfort complaining of the evil effects which the Volunteer Convention and the growing suspicion on the Continent that Ireland was about to follow the example of America were likely to have on English influence and on English commercial negotiations. 2 But the very full and confidential correspondence which Count d'Adhémar, the French ambassador at London, carried on at this time with his Govermnent, sufficiently shows that he had no agent employed in Ireland and little or no knowledge of Irish affairs which might not have been derived from the public newspapers and from the current political gossip of London. Though D'Adhémar, believed firmly in the high character and sincerely pacific disposition of Pitt, he was persuaded that peace with France would only continue as long as England was too weak for war. The nation, he said, ulcerated by the humiliation of the last war, was implacably hostile, and would soon force its Government into a renewed struggle. In the interval French influence should be employed to injure England wherever she was weak, and the two quarters in which it might be most profitably exerted, were India and America. In April 1784 he first called attention to affairs of Ireland. He mentions the great excitement produced in the English as well as the Irish newspapers by Foster's Press Bill; the skill with which Fox had already made use of it; the probability that it would assist him in the Westminster election which was now pending. He afterwards reports that the Viceroy had been attacked on account of the Press Bill; that the Irish corporations were protesting against it; that nonimportation agreements were multiplying; that the affairs of Ireland were taking a very serious turn. The Government, he believed, were anxious to disavow Foster, and a courier had started for Ireland for the purpose of suspending the operation of the Bill. He knew, from a good source, that ministers had desired to arrest the Bishop of Derry, but were prevented by a division in the Council. The Duke of Rutland was anxious to resign, and the Duchess had lately written to a lady friend in England, expressing her anxiety about the incapacity of her husband and the frightful growth of the spirit of insurrection. There had been a meeting at the Dublin Town Hall, presided over by the municipal officers, at which the corrupt constitution of Parliament was unanimously denounced. ‘There is a military association which has been deliberating about presenting an address to Lewis XVI., the defender of the rights of the human race.’ From the accounts of the volunteer reviews it appeared to the ambassador, that more than 70,000 men were under arms. ‘Even if no other advantage,’ he added, ‘came from threatening the British coast, the calling this great force under arms would have been a great one.’ 1

The tension, however, soon passed, and several years elapsed before French ministers were seriously occupied with Ireland. The next few years of Irish history were quiet and uneventful, and although no great reform was effected, the growing prosperity of the country was very perceptible. The House of Commons gave the Government little or no trouble, and whatever agitations or extreme views may have been advocated beyond its walls, the most cautious conservative could hardly accuse it of any tendency to insubordination or violence. It consisted almost entirely of landlords, lawyers, and placemen. Its more important discussions show a great deal of oratorical and debating talent, much knowledge of the country and considerable administrative power; it was ardently and unanimously attached to the Crown and the connection, and the accumulation of borough interests at the disposal of the Treasury, and the habitual custom of ‘supporting the King's Government,’ gave the Government on nearly all questions an overwhelming strength. The majority had certainly no desire to carry any measure of reform which would alter their own very secure and agreeable position, or expose them to the vicissitudes of popular contests, but the influence of the Government was so overwhelming that even in this direction much might have been done by Government initiative, and it is remarkable that in all the letters of the Irish Government opposing parliamentary reform, nothing is said of the impracticability of carrying it. On the whole, it would be difficult to find a legislative body which was less troublesome to the Executive. There was one subject and only one upon which it was recalcitrant. It was jealous to the very highest degree of its own position as an independent Legislature, and any measure which appeared even remotely designed to restrict its powers and to make it subordinate to the British Parliament, produced a sudden and immediate revolt.

The prosperity of the country was advancing, and the revenue was rising, but the expenses of the Government still outstripped its income, and there were loud complaints of growing extravagance. Many things had indeed recently conspired to increase the national expenditure. Free trade opening out vast markets for Irish products, had induced Parliament to give larger bounties for the purpose of stimulating native manufactures. The erection of a magnificent custom-house; great works of inland navigation; an augmentation of the salaries of the judges in 1781; additional revenue officers required by an expanding trade; additional officials needed for the New National Bank, fell heavily on the finances. In 1783 an independent member proposed that the salary of the Lord-Lieutenant should be raised from 16,000 l. , at which it had been fixed twenty-two years before, to 20,000 l. It was argued that the expense of the office was notoriously greater than its salary; that the constant residence of the Lord-Lieutenant, the annual sessions of Parliament, and the increased cost of living had largely augmented it, and that it was not in accordance with the dignity of the nation, that an English nobleman should be obliged to appropriate part of his private fortune to support the position of Viceroy of Ireland. The augmentation was refused by Lord Northington, but accepted by his successor, and it was speedily followed by the addition of 2,000 l. a year to the salary of the Chief Secretary. Strong objections were made to the latter proposal, and it appears to have been carried mainly on account of a speech of the Attorney-General, who promised that it would put an end to the scandalous system of granting great Irish offices for life to retiring Chief Secretaries. Some of the chief offices in the country had been thus bestowed, and with the single exception of Sir John Blaquiere all those who held them lived habitually in England. 1 In 1784 three new judges were appointed, and the introduction of annual sessions of Parliament involved some necessary and legitimate expenditure, and probably contributed not a little both to parliamentary prodigality and Government corruption. ‘The contention for parliamentary favour,’ it was said, ‘becaame in a manner perpetual. The doors of the temple were never shut,’ 2 and the increased importance of the House of Commons made Government more and more desirous of securing by pensions and sinecures an overwhelming parliamentary influence.

There was a strong desire to bring back the great Irish offices to the country. In the beginning of the reign of George II. it was noticed that among the habitual absentees were officers of the Irish Post Office, whose salaries amounted to 6,000 l. a year; the Master of the Ordnance; the Master of the Rolls; the Lord Treasurer and the three Vice-Treasurers; the four Commissioners of the Revenue; the Secretary of State; the Clerks of the Crown for Leinster, Ulster, and Munster; the Master of the Revels, and even the Secretary of the Lord-Lieutenant. 3 One of the most scandalous Irish measures in the early years of George III. had been the grant of the Irish Chancellorship of the Exchequer for life, to Single Speech Hamilton, in 1763. He was allowed to treat it as an absolute sinecure, and the management of Irish finances was thrown for many years upon the Attorney-General, a busy lawyer who had no special knowledge of the subject. Although the value of the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer was only 1,800 l. a year, the Government after a long negotiation consented in 1784 to buy it back from Hamilton by the grant of a life pension on Ireland of 2,500 l. a year, with the power to sell his pension. 4

The office, however, was admirably bestowed, being granted to John Foster, one of the very foremost figures in the Irish Parliament. He was the son of that Chief Baron Foster whom Arthur Young had described as one of the ablest men, and one of the best and most improving landlords in Ireland, and he had already taken the leading part in the foundation of the National Bank. He was also the author of some measures which had been extremely successful in encouraging the linen trade, as well as of the corn bounties which we have already considered. That excellent judge, Woodfall, described him as ‘one of the readiest and most clear-headed men of business’ he had ever met with, 1 and no one, I think, can read his speeches without being struck with the singular ability and the singular knowledge they display. His strong opposition to protecting duties; his Press Bill, and the prominent and very able part which he took in defence of the commercial propositions of 1785, made him for a time unpopular in Dublin; but his high character and his great financial knowledge were universally recognised. In the autumn of 1785, when Pery retired from the Chair which he had occupied for more than fourteen years, Foster was unanimously elected Speaker, and he held that position till the Union. He still, however, occasionally contributed some admirable speeches to the debates. He was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Sir John Parnell.

Several other great offices were still held by absentees, 2 but none of them were as important as the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. In 1784, there was a curious discussion on the habitual absence of the Master of the Rolls, and it was defended by the Attorney-General Fitzgibbon, on the very grotesque ground that it was conducive to the good administration of justice. ‘If the Master of the Rolls,’ he said, ‘was compelled to become a resident and efficient officer, it would render the business of the Court of Chancery more prolix and tedious than it is at present.’ There would be another appeal in Chancery suits, and ‘this would be attended with delay and inconvenience to suitors, and would give great additional reason to curse the law's delay.’ 3 The office was held by Rigby, who had no other connection with Ireland since he had ceased to be Chief Secretary in the first year of the reign. On his death in 1788, it was brought back to Ireland, but it was still treated as a mere lucrative sinecure and was given to the Duke of Leinster. 4

This abuse at last gradually ceased. Some offices were bought back by pensions, though often on most extravagant terms. 1 Others fell in by death; the feeling on the subject in Parliament was generally strong enough to prevent fresh appointments to absentees, and the Government in Ireland desired to employ all their patronage at home in resisting the movement for a parliamentary reform.

The position of the English Government on the question of reform varied at different times, but on the whole English statesmen were usually considerably more liberal than the Administration in Ireland. Pitt came to power with the reputation of a great parliamentary reformer, and he was at first seriously desirous of carrying out his early pledges and of fulfilling the programme of his illustrious father. If reform was needed anywhere, it was needed in Ireland, and if it was carried in one country it was tolerably certain that it would be impossible to resist it in the other. His confidential letters to the Duke of Rutland are preserved, and they show that he was at one period sincerely anxious to reform the Irish Parliament, though he was at this time equally determined not to admit the Catholics to power. ‘The line to which my mind at present inclines,’ he wrote (‘open to whatever new observations or arguments may be suggested to me), is to give Ireland an almost unlimited communication of commercial advantages, if we can receive in return some security that her strength and riches will be our benefit, and that she will contribute from time to time in their increasing proportions to the common exigencies of the Empire; and having by holding out this, removed, I trust, every temptation to Ireland to consider her interests as separate from England, to be ready, while we discountenance wild and unconstitutional attempts, which strike at the root of all authority, to give real efficacy and popularity to the Government by acceding (if such a line can be found) to a prudent and temperate reform of Parliament, which may guard against, or gradually cure, real defects and mischiefs, may show a sufficient regard to the interests and even prejudices of individuals who are concerned, and may unite the Protestant interest in excluding the Catholics from any share in the representation or the government of the country.’ 1 He begs Rutland to sound the dispositions of Charlemont and the other reformers, and says, ‘By all I hear accidentally, the parliamentary reformers are alarmed at the pretensions of the Catholics, and for that very reason would stop very short of the extreme speculative notions of universal suffrage.’ ‘Let me beseech you,’ he adds, ‘to recollect that both your character and mine for consistency are at stake unless there are unanswerable proofs that the case of Ireland and England is different; and to recollect also, that however it is our duty to oppose the most determined spirit and firmness to ill-founded clamour or factious pretensions, it is a duty equally indispensable to take care not to struggle but in a right cause. ‘I am more and more convinced in my own mind every day, that some reform will take place in both countries. Whatever is to be wished (on which, notwithstanding numerous difficulties, I have myself no doubt), it is, I believe, at least certain that if any reform takes place here, the tide will be too strong to be withstood in Ireland.’ ‘If it be well done, the sooner the better.’ ‘Should there appear, after a certain time, a prospect that the complete arrangement of commercial questions will be followed by some satisfaction on this essential point of reform, I believe the arms will then drop out of the hands of the volunteers without a struggle.’ He only desired that the Irish Government should not commit itself irrevocably to reform ‘while the question is undecided in England.’ 2

The Irish Administration, on the other hand, was strongly opposed to any measure of reform. They had got their majority by the small borough system, and they wished to keep it, and opposed a strong passive resistance to every attempt from England to impel them in the direction of reform. The chief governor was naturally surrounded by great borough owners, whose personal interests were bound up with the existing political system, and the spirit both of resistance and of anti-Catholicism was very greatly strengthened when, on the promotion of Yelverton to the Bench in 1783, Fitzgibbon became Attorney-General. This remarkable man, who for the last sixteen years of the century exercised a dominant influence in the Irish Government, and who, as Lord Clare, was the ablest, and at the same time the most detested, advocate of the Union, had in 1780 opposed the Declaration of Right moved by Grattan in the House of Commons, but had supported the policy of Grattan in 1782, and had used strong language in censuring some parts of the legislative authority which Great Britain exercised over Ireland. 1 It is very questionable whether he ever really approved of the repeal of Poynings' Law, and his evident leaning towards authority made him distrusted by several leaders of the popular party, but Grattan does not appear to have shared the feeling, and when he was consulted on the subject by Lord Northington, he gave his full sanction to the promotion of Fitzgibbon. 2 For some time there was no breach between them, and in one of his speeches in 1785 Fitzgibbon spoke in high terms of the character and services of Grattan, 3 but the dispute on the commercial propositions appears to have separated them, and Fitzgibbon soon followed the true instincts of his character and his intellect, in opposing an iron will to every kind of reform. In private life he appears to have been an estimable and even amiable man; several acts of generosity are related of him, and the determination with which in spite of a large inherited fortune he pursued his career at the bar, shows the energy and the seriousness of his character. He is said not to have been a great orator, but he was undoubtedly a very ready and skilful debater, a great master of constitutional law, a man who in council had a peculiar gift of bending other wills to his own, a man who in many trying periods of popular violence displayed a courage which no denger and no obloquy could disturb. He was, however, arrogant, petulant, and overbearing in the highest degree, delighting in trampling on those whom he disliked, in harsh acts and irritating words, prone on all occasions to strain prerogative and authority to their utmost limits, bitterly hostile to the great majority of his countrymen, and, without being corrupt himself, a most cynical corrupter of others. Curran, both in Parliament and at the bar, had been one of his bitterest opponents, and a duel having on one occasion ensued, a great scandal was created by the slow and deliberate manner in which, contrary to the ordinary rules of duels, Fitzgibbon aimed at his opponent, 1 and when he became Lord Chancellor he was accused of having, by systematic hostility and partiality on the bench, compelled his former adversary to abandon his practice in the court. 2

As a politician, Fitzgibbon, though his father had been one of the many Catholics who abandoned their faith in order to pursue a legal career, represented in its harshest and most arrogant form the old spirit of Protestant ascendency as it existed when the smoke of the civil wars had scarcely cleared away, and he laughed to scorn all who taught that there could be any peace between the different sections of Irishmen, or that the century which had elapsed since the Revolution had made any real change in the situation of the country. A passage in his great speech in favour of the Union is the keynote of his whole policy. ‘What, then,’ he asked, ‘was the situation of Ireland at the Revolution, and what is it at this day? The whole power and property of the country has been conferred by successive monarchs of England upon an English colony composed of three sets of English adventurers, who poured into this country at the termination of three successive rebellions. Confiscation is their common title, and from their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation.’ 1 In accordance with these views his uniform object was to represent the Protestant community as an English garrison planted in a hostile country, to govern steadily, sternly, and exclusively, with a view to their interests, to resist to the utmost every attempt to relax monopoly, elevate and conciliate the Catholics or draw together the divided sections of Irish life. Even in the days when he professed liberalism, he had endeavoured to impede the Catholic Relief Bill of 1778 by raising difficulties about the effects of relief of the Catholics on the Act of Settlement; and after he arrived in power, he was a steady and bitter opponent of every measure of concession. 2 He was sometimes obliged to yield. He was sometimes opposed to his colleagues in Ireland, and more often to the Government in England, but the main lines of his policy were on the whole maintained, and it is difficult to exaggerate the evil they caused. To him, more perhaps than to any other man, it is due that nothing was done during the quiet years that preceded the French Revolution to diminish the corruption of the Irish Parliament, or the extreme anomalies of the Irish ecclesiastical establishment. He was the soul of that small group of politicians, who, by procuring the recall of Lord Fitz-william and the refusal of Catholic emancipation in 1795, flung the Catholics into the rebellion of 1798, and his influence was one of the chief obstacles to the determination of Pitt to carry Catholic Emancipation concurrently with the Union. He looked, indeed, upon the Union as shutting the door for ever against the Catholics, and it was only when it had been carried by his assistance, that he learned to his bitter indignation that the Government, without his knowledge, had been negotiating secretly with their leaders. 1

The possibility of a loyal Irish Parliament undergoing parliamentary and ministerial fluctuations, like those which are now frequent in the robust constitutional Governments of the colonies, never appears to have entered into his calculations, and he avowed very cynically that in his theory of a separate Parliament, corruption should be the normal method of government. ‘The only security,’ he said, ‘which can by possibility exist for national concurrence, is a permanent and commanding influence of the English Executive, or rather of the English Cabinet, in the councils of Ireland.’ ‘A majority in the Parliament of Great Britain will defeat the Minister of the day, but a majority of the Parliament of Ireland against the King's Government goes directly to separate this kingdom from the British Crown. … It is vain to expect, so long as man continues to be a creature of passion and interest, that he will not avail himself of the critical and difficult situation in which the Executive Government of this kingdom must ever remain under its present Constitution, to demand the favours of the Crown, not as the reward of loyalty and service, but as the stipulated price to be paid in advance for the discharge of a public duty.’ 2 In one of the debates on the Regency be openly avowed that half a million had on a former occasion been spent to secure an address to Lord Townshend, and intimated very plainly that the same sum would if necessary be spent again. 3

We can hardly judge such sentiments with fairness, if we do not remember that with the partial and disastrous exception of the American Legislatures, the experiment of free parliamentary life in colonies with which we are now so familiar had not yet been tried, and also that the necessity of retaining a great Crown influence in the English House of Commons was still widely held. Nor was this view confined to party men or to active and interested politicians. In 1752 Hume published those political essays which are still among the most valuable and were on their first appearance by far the most popular of his works, and in one of these essays he inquires what it is that prevents the House of Commons from breaking loose from its place in the Constitution and reducing the other powers to complete subservience to itself. He answers that ‘the House of Commons stretches not its power because such a usurpation would be contrary to the interests of the majority of its members. The Crown has so many offices at its disposal that when assisted by the honest and disinterested part of the House it will always command the resolutions of the whole. … We may call this influence by the invidious appellations of corruption and dependence; but some degree and some kind of it are inseparable from the very nature of the Constitution, and necessary to the preservation of our mixed government.’ 1

To exactly the same effect is the judgment of Paley, whose treatise on moral and political philosophy appeared in 1785, and who devoted an admirable chapter to the actual working of the British Constitution. He asserts that about half of the members sitting in the House of Commons of England when he wrote, held their seats either by purchase or by the nomination of single patrons, and he urged with singular ingenuity that, however absurd it might appear in theory, some such system of representation was absolutely necessary in the British Constitution to give cohesion and solidity to the whole, to counteract the natural centrifugal tendency which would otherwise lead the House of Commons to break loose from its place in the Constitution, and the natural tendency of its own democratic element to acquire a complete control over its policy. He describes the saying that an ‘independent parliament is incompatible with the existence of a monarchy’ as containing ‘not more of paradox than of truth,’ and he attributes the severance of the British colonies in North America from the mother country, mainly to the fact that the English Government held so little patronage in those colonies that it was never able to acquire a commanding and interested support in the colonial Legislatures. 1

In such maxims we find principles very similar to those of Fitzgibbon, and they were unfortunately predominant in the Irish councils. ‘The question of reform,’ Rutland wrote to Pitt, ‘should it be carried in England, would tend greatly to increase our difficulties, and I do not see how it will be evaded. In England it is a delicate question, but in this country it is difficult and dangerous to the last degree. The views of the Catholics render it extremely hazardous. … Your proposition of a certain proportionable addition to county members would be the least exceptionable, and might not, perhaps, materially interfere with the system of Parliament in this country, which, though it must be confessed that it does not bear the smallest resemblance to representation, I do not see how quiet and good government could exist under any more popular mode.’ 2 ‘The object of reform form,’ he wrote a few months later, ‘is by no means confined to a correction of alleged abuses in the representation, but extends to a substantial change of parliamentary influence. Nothing short of that will satisfy the clamorous, and any such change will completely dissatisfy the friends of Government and the established Constitution.’ He warned the Government that any change in the representation would strengthen and perhaps unite the factious elements in the nation—‘the Dissenters, who seek for such an alteration in the Constitution as will throw more power into their hands; … the Roman Catholics, whose superior numbers would speedily give them the upper hand if they were admitted to a participation in the Legislature; and those men who oppose the Government upon personal considerations.’ 1 In accordance with these views we find him, at the very time when the demand for reform and retrenchment was at its height, advocating the creation of new places for the purpose of strengthening the parliamentary influence of Government. 2

In sharp contrast with these views was the policy of Grattan and of a small number of able and patriotic men who followed his standard. Grattan clearly perceived that after the great triumph that had been achieved and the great agitation that had been undergone, it was necessary to pacify the public mind, to lead it back to the path of gradual administrative reform, to strengthen the Executive against the spirit of disorder, and at the same time to discourage all feeling of disloyalty to England. We have already seen how he looked upon the Renunciation Act, the Volunteer Convention, and the proposed diminution of the military establishments. In 1782, when the Dublin weavers resolved to enter into a non-importation agreement, he dexterously defeated the design by substituting for it a subscription list, pledging all who signed to purchase Irish goods to the amount placed opposite their names. 1 He steadily opposed the agitation for protecting duties which would have separated the commercial interests of England and Ireland. 2 He was foremost in denouncing a portion of the Irish press which was openly inciting to assassination, and which had lately introduced a detestable system, that already existed in England, of extorting money from timid individuals by threats of slander, and in spite of the violent outcry that was raised, he cordially supported Foster's Press Bill. 3 The tone of the seditious press he justly described as a matter deserving the most serious consideration of Parliament. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘of wounding the liberty of the press, but if it be suffered to go on in the way it is at present, one of two things must ensue: it will either excite the unthinking to acts of desperation, or it will itself fall into utter contempt, after having disgraced the nation.’ 4

In 1785, when the Government resolved to organise the militia chiefly for the purpose of rendering the volunteer force unnecessary, Grattan gave them his full support; and when this measure was represented as an offence to the volunteers, he repudiated the argument with a scathing severity. ‘The volunteers,’ he said, ‘had no right whatever to be displeased at the establishment of a militia, and if they had expressed displeasure, the dictate of armed men ought to be disregarded by Parliament.’ ‘We are the Legislature and they the subject.’ ‘The situation of the House would be truly unfortunate if the name of the volunteers could intimidate it. … That great and honourable body of men, the primitive volunteers, deserved much of their country, but I am free to say that they who now assume the name have much degenerated. … There is a cankered part of the dregs of the people that has been armed. Let no gentleman give such men countenance, or pretend to join them with the original volunteers.’ He looked with extreme disapprobation on all attempts to set up rival centres of political power outside Parliament, and at the risk of a complete sacrifice of his popularity he censured in strong terms the national congress which had assembled in Dublin, asserting that, whether it was legal or not, such a body was not reconcilable with a House of Commons; that ‘two sets of representatives, one de jure, and another supposing itself a representative de facto, cannot well co-exist,’ and that it was such meetings that ‘gave the business of reform the cast and appearance of innovation and violence.’ ‘The populace,’ he said, ‘differ much and should be clearly distinguished from the people.’ ‘An appeal to the latent and summary powers of the people should be reserved for extraordinary exigencies. The rejection of a popular Bill is no just cause for their exertion.’ 1

No politician had ever less sympathy than Grattan with disorder and anarchy; and his whole theory of Irish politics was very far from democratic. From first to last it was a foremost article of his policy that it was essential to the safe working of representative institutions in Ireland that they should be under the full guidance and control of the property of the country, and that the greatest of all calamities would be that this guidance should pass into the hands of adventurers and demagogues. He desired the House of Commons to be a body consisting mainly of the independent landed gentry and leading lawyers, and resting mainly on a freehold suffrage; and he would have gladly included in it the leading members of that Catholic gentry who had long been among the most loyal and most respectable subjects of the Crown. He believed that a body so constituted was most likely to draw together the severed elements of Irish life; to watch over Irish interests; to guide the people upwards to a higher level of civilisation and order; to correct the many and glaring evils of Irish life. But in order that it should perform this task, it was indispensable that it should be a true organ of national feeling; a faithful representative of educated opinion and of independent property; able and willing to pursue energetically the course of administrative reform which was imperatively needed. It was necessary above all that the system of governing exclusively by corruption and family interest should be terminated. Such a system was absolutely inevitable in a Parliament constituted like that of Ireland, and without any one of the more important legislative guarantees of parliamentary purity that existed in England.

Grattan would gladly have left it to the Government to take the initiative in the question of parliamentary reform, but when that question was introduced he strongly maintained, in opposition to the Government, that the Bills which were brought before the House should at least be suffered to go into committee, to be discussed, modified, and amended in detail. While opposing a reduction of the military establishments he maintained that for this very reason civil retrenchment ought to be more earnestly pursued, and he vainly attempted to procure an inquiry into the expense of collecting the revenue. He complained that this expense had risen between 1758 and 1783 from 81,000 l. to 157,000 l. , from 13 to 16 per cent. of the revenue, and that it was a common thing to grant by royal prerogative large additional salaries to sinecure or perfectly insignificant offices, held by supporters of the Government, in order that their names should not appear in the pension list. Grattan vainly tried to procure a parliamentary condemnation of this system of masked pensions, and he dilated in many able speeches on the absolute necessity of reducing the expenditure within the limits of the public income. During the Administration of Lord Northington he gave the Government an independent support, but in the following Administrations, when the influence of Fitzgibbon became supreme, when it was evident that the Government was opposed to all serious retrenchment and reform, when pensions and offices were created with the obvious purpose of increasing parliamentary influence, Grattan passed gradually into opposition and endeavoured to create an organised party capable, if any change occurred, of taking the reins of power. He was at this time undisputed leader of his party. Flood reintroduced his Reform Bill in the spring of 1785, and he afterwards concurred heartily with Grattan in opposing the amended commercial propositions; but after this time he rarely appeared in the Irish Parliament, and he died in 1791. Charlemont had never much parliamentary influence, and the Bishop of Derry soon after the episode of the Convention left Ireland on the plea of ill-health, and spent the remaining years of his life in Italy, where he led a wild and profligate life, and at length died in 1803 at Albano. 1

The measures advocated by Grattan and the small party who followed him, during the period we are considering, were usually of the most moderate character. A place Bill limiting the number of placemen who sat in the House of Commons, copied from that which for more than eighty years had existed in the English Statute-book; a pension Bill limiting the number of pensioners; a responsibility Bill giving additional guarantees for the proper expenditure of different branches of the revenue, and a disenfranchisement of revenue and custom-house officers like that which had been carried in England under Rockingham, would at this time have satisfied their demands. But such demands were met with a steady resistance. Nothing was done to diminish the evil, and, on the contrary, it continued to increase. It was alleged in Parliament, apparently with perfect truth, that in the beginning of 1789, exclusive of the military pensions, the pension list had risen to 101,000 l. a year, and that pensions to the amount of 16,000 l. , many of them distributed among members of Parliament, had been created since March 1784, besides considerable additional salaries which had been added to several obsolete, useless, and sinecure offices in the hands of members of Parliament. 1 Grattan in the beginning of 1790 described in a few graphic words the condition of the House of Commons. ‘Above two-thirds of the returns to this House are private property; of those returns many actually this moment sold to the Minister; the number of placemen and pensioners sitting in this House equals near one-half of the whole efficient body; the increase of that number within the last twenty years is greater than all the counties in Ireland.’ 2

The rights which Irish commerce had attained in the last few years have already been described. The very liberal legislation of Lord North had granted Ireland the full right of direct trade with the English plantations of Africa and America, on the sole condition of establishing the same duties and regulations as those to which the English trade with the plantations was subject, and also a full participation of the English trade with the Levant, while the subsequent establishment of her legislative independence had left her absolutely free to regulate her trade by treaty with all foreign countries. The monopoly of the East India Company still excluded her from the Asiatic trade, but in the present condition of her undeveloped manufactures this was not considered a matter of any real importance. The trade between England and Ireland was of course regulated by the Acts of their respective Parliaments. Ireland admitted all English goods either freely or at low duties; she had not imposed any prohibitory duty on them, and whenever she laid heavy duties on any article which could be produced in Great Britain, she had almost always excepted the British article. 3 The British Parliament had excluded most Irish manufactures, and especially Irish manufactured wool, by duties amounting to prohibition, but in the interest of English woollen manufacturers it freely admitted Irish woollen yarn, and in the interest of Ireland it admitted linen, which was the most important article of Irish manufacture, without any duty whatever, and even encouraged it by a small bounty. ‘The whole amount of the British manufacture which Ireland actually takes from England under a low duty,’ said Pitt, ‘does not amount to so much as the single article of linen which we are content to take from you under no duty at all.’ 1 Either Parliament had the right of altering this arrangement, and it was tolerably certain that if Ireland imposed prohibitory taxes on English goods, England would pursue a corresponding policy towards Irish linen. By a construction of the Navigation Act, foreign commodities could not be carried into England by or through Ireland, and although Ireland had the right of trading directly with the colonies, she was prohibited from sending plantation goods to England, or receiving them from her. 2 She might, however, send her own manufactures to Africa and America, and bring back to Great Britain all their produce. 3

Pitt was one of the few persons who perceived that a perpetual free trade between the two countries would be an advantage to both, and he hoped to frame such a treaty as would unite the two parts of the Empire indissolubly both for military and commercial purposes, would put an end to all possibility of a future war of hostile tariffs, and, without altering essentially the existing constitutional arrangements, would at the same time add considerably to the military strength of the Empire. He proposed that a treaty should be carried, establishing for the future perfect free trade between the two countries. But as such a treaty, throwing open to Ireland the enormous markets of England, and securing to her for ever the market of the plantations, would be a much greater boon to Ireland than to England, Ireland might reasonably be expected to purchase it by paying a fixed contribution in time of peace and war to the general defence of the Empire. The terms of the proposal were very clearly stated in a confidential letter from Sydney to Rutland: ‘Your grace should endeavour to obtain, at the same time with the intended commercial regulations, an act of the Parliament of Ireland appropriating the future surplus of the hereditary revenue … to the Navy and general defence of the Empire … leaving the manner of applying it, and of having it particularly accounted for, to the Parliament of this country. It should also be explicitly understood, first, that any mode of contribution to be thus established is not to be made a pretext for withdrawing any part of the aid now given by the Irish Parliament towards the general expenses of the Empire, in the maintenance of the regiments upon the Irish establishment serving out of this kingdom, and, secondly, that such a fund is considered only as a means for defraying … the ordinary expenses of the Empire in time of peace, and that Ireland will still in case of war or any extraordinary emergency be called upon and expected voluntarily to contribute, as in reason and justice she ought, to such further exertions as the situation of affairs and the general interests of the Empire may from time to time require.’ 1 The hereditary revenue was selected as the source of the proposed contribution for two reasons—because it consisted mainly of custom and excise duties, the increase in which would, it was anticipated, be a direct consequence of the commercial boons that were offered; and because the proposition was likely to be more palatable to the Irish Parliament as it gave that Parliament a right of appropriating for ever to objects in which Ireland had an essential interest, a portion of the revenue which was now ‘entrusted to the general direction of the Crown.’ 2 The Navy was selected for the application of the fund because it would always be in part employed to defend the coast and the commerce of Ireland. The Parliaments of the two nations were in the first instance to be asked to carry resolutions embodying these terms, and these resolutions were then to be turned into Bills.

Before the plan was brought into Parliament it was fully discussed in confidential letters which passed between the English and Irish Governments, and the Lord-Lieutenant clearly stated what were likely to be the Irish objections to the scheme. The creation of a free trade between England and Ireland was the great offer made to Ireland, but there was a party in Ireland who looked upon this much more as an evil than as a good. It would for ever prevent Ireland from improving her manufactures by protecting duties or special bounties on exportation, and would secure the ascendency which great capital, extensive establishments, and a settled position had given to English manufacturers even in the Irish market. The plantation trade ought surely, it would be said, not to be made an element in a new bargain, for it had been already granted to Ireland under Lord North, and he had in this respect only replaced Ireland in the position she had occupied before the amended Navigation Act of Charles II. These things, however, the Lord-Lieutenant thought could be got over, but he warned the Government that the provision obliging Ireland to contribute to the Imperial expenditure must be managed with extreme delicacy, and might lead to the most violent resistance. No such stipulation had been annexed to the commercial concessions of 1779. The public revenue of Ireland was at this time at least 150,000 l. a year less than the public charges, and therefore it was exceedingly unfit to bear an additional burden. Nor was this a time in which any unpopular proposal could be safely brought forward. ‘The disappointment by Parliament of the popular expectations respecting a reform in the representation, and their not granting protecting duties which the manufacturers of this city more particularly demanded, drove the people from their accustomed deference to the decisions of Parliament, and led them to look to other methods of accomplishing their ends by means of a congress and by non-importation agreements. The county candidates in general found themselves under the necessity of giving in to the popular cry, and the unsuccessful candidates joined in.’ Abstractedly, the proposal of the Government seemed to the Lord-Lieutenant perfectly just, but he feared that it would be so unpopular that even if it were carried through Parliament it would seriously unsettle the country and unite the factious elements. England should be content with the large military expenditure which Ireland cheerfully contributed to the Empire, and with the many indirect ways in which she benefited the richer country. 1 To insist upon a forced contribution would probably have the effect of diminishing the voluntary grants, and would therefore be of no service to the Empire, while constitutional objections of the most serious kind might be raised. This was the first instance of an attempt to impose an obligatory contribution, and it would be a calamitous thing if it could be represented as bearing any resemblance to the policy which had proved so disastrous in America. Any stipulation which tended to make Ireland a tributary of England, which deprived the Irish Parliament of its exclusive control over Irish resources, which made it in any degree dependent on or inferior to the British Legislature, would strike the most sensitive chord in the Irish Parliament. ‘If the surplus,’ wrote Rutland, ‘is in any way whatever to be remitted into England either in money or in goods, the resolution will never be carried.’ If the Government insisted upon a contribution, the Lord-Lieutenant hoped that it might be specified that it should be expended in Ireland; and it might be employed for the purpose of maintaining a portion of the British Navy devoted to the defence of the Irish coast. 2

Pitt himself devoted some confidential letters to an explanation of the views of the Cabinet, and they appear to me eminently creditable both to his economical sagacity and to his honesty of purpose. 3 ‘In the relation of Great Britain’ [with Ireland], he wrote, ‘there can subsist but two possible principles of connection, one, that which is exploded, of total subordination in Ireland and of restrictions on her commerce for the benefit of this country, which was by this means enabled to bear the whole burden of the Empire; the other, … that of an equal participation of all commercial advantages and some proportion of the charge of protecting the general interests.’ ‘The fundamental principle and the only one on which the whole plan can be justified … is that for the future the two countries will be to the most essential purposes united. On this ground the wealth and prosperity of the whole is the object; from what local sources they arise is indifferent.’ ‘We open to Ireland the chance of a competition with ourselves on terms of more than equality, and we give her advantages which make it impossible she should ever have anything to fear from the jealousy or restrictive policy of this country in future.’ We desire to make ‘England and Ireland one country in effect, though for local concerns under distinct Legislatures, one in the communication of advantages, and, of course, in the participation of burdens.’ ‘In order to effect this we are departing from the policy of prohibiting duties so long established in this country. In doing so we are, perhaps, to encounter the prejudices of our manufacturing [mterests] in every corner of the kingdom. We are admitting to this competition a country whose labour is cheap and whose resources are unexhausted; ourselves burdened with accumulated taxes which are felt in the price of every necessary of life, and, of course, enter into the cost of every article of manufacture. It is, indeed, stated on the other hand that Ireland has neither the skill, the industry, nor the capital of this country; but it is difficult to assign any good reason why she should not gradually, with such strong encouragement, imitate and rival us in both the former, and in both more rapidly from time, as she grows possessed of a larger capital, which, with all the temptations for it, may, perhaps, to some degree be transferred to her from hence, but which will, at all events, be increased if her commerce receives any extension.’

England, however, had a perfect right to make the opening of the plantation market an element in the question. The removal of restrictions which prevented Ireland from trading with foreign countries had been a matter of justice; but the English plantations had been established under the sole direction of the English Parliament and Government; it was, therefore, by a mere act of favour that Ireland was suffered to trade directly with them; 1 it was proposed that she should have the additional advantage of supplying England through Ireland with their goods, and now that a final arrangement is made, now that ‘the balance is to be struck and the account closed between the two countries, we must take full credit as well for what has been given by others … as for what we give ourselves.’

The indispensable condition to be insisted on, is that there should be ‘some fixed mode of contribution on the part of Ireland, in proportion to her growing means, to the general defence;’ that this contribution should not be left dependent upon the disposition and humour, the opinions and interests, that may from time to time prevail in the Irish Parliament, and that it should be under the complete control of the supreme Executive of the Empire. ‘In Ireland it cannot escape consideration that this is a contribution not given beforehand for uncertain expectations, but which can only follow the actual possession and enjoyment of the benefits in return for which it is given. If Ireland does not grow richer and more populous she will by this scheme contribute nothing. If she does grow richer by the participation of our trade, surely she ought to contribute, and the measure of that contribution cannot with equal justice be fixed in any other proportion. It can never be contended that the increase of the hereditary revenue ought to be left to Ireland as the means of gradually diminishing her other taxes, unless it can be argued that the whole of what Ireland now pays is a greater burden, in proportion, than the whole of what is paid by this country. … It is to be remembered that the very increase supposed to arise in the hereditary revenue cannot arise without a similar increase in many articles of the additional taxes; consequently from that circumstance alone, though they part with the future increase of their hereditary revenue, their income will be upon the whole increased, without imposing any additional burdens. On the whole, therefore, if Ireland allows that she ought ever in time of peace to contribute at all, I can conceive no plausible objection to the particular mode proposed.’ 1

‘The idea of Ireland contributing only for the support of her own immediate and separate benefit,’ Sydney urged, ‘is the direct reverse of the principle which ought to govern the present settlement and utterly inadmissible.’ 2 It was essential to the strength and unity of the Empire that some such contribution as was proposed should be made, and it was perfectly idle to suppose that without some such evident advantage to the Empire the English Parliament would consent to relinquish its trade monopolies. The most desirable arrangement, in the opinion of the Government, would be that the surplus of the Irish hereditary revenue should be applied to the reduction of the English national debt. But if, as might easily be expected, this very singular proposal proved unacceptable, the Cabinet insisted that the surplus must at least be set aside by the Irish Parliament to be applied to the naval forces of the Empire. There was no objection to giving a preference to Irish stores and manufactures for the use of the Navy, and if it was absolutely impossible to carry the scheme in any other form, the required sum might be annually appropriated by, and the estimates annually laid before, the Irish Parliament. 3

Pitt's plan was brought before the Irish Parliament on February 7, 1785, in the form of ten resolutions. Their most important provisions were that all foreign and colonial goods might pass from England to Ireland and from Ireland to England without any increase of duty, that all Irish goods might be imported into England and all English goods into Ireland either freely or at duties which were the same in each country, that where the duties in the two countries were now unequal they should be equalised by reducing the higher duty to the level of the lower, that except in a few carefully specified cases there should be no new duties on importation or bounties on exportation, that each country should give a preference in its markets to the goods of the other over the same goods imported from abroad, and that whenever the hereditary revenue exceeded a sum which was as yet not specified, the surplus ‘should be appropriated towards the support of the naval forces of the Empire in such manner as the Parliament of this kingdom shall direct.’ 1

These were the propositions now laid by Orde before the Irish Parliament, but it was soon found that one important modification of the plan was necessary. Grattan looked with much favour upon the general scheme, but he at first hesitated about the compulsory contribution. It assumed, to his mind, too much the appearance of a subsidy. It was indefinite in its amount and might rise with the prosperity of the country to a wholly inordinate sum, and he evidently agreed with Foster that as a matter of policy ‘it would be better for Britain to leave the affair to the liberality and ability of the moment when our aid might be necessary.’ 2 This objection, however, on reflection he was ready to waive, but he insisted strenuously that no additional contribution should be paid to the general defence of the Empire till the Government had consented to put an end to the ruinous system of annual deficits and almost annual loans which had already seriously injured the credit of the nation. 3 In order to meet this objection a new resolution was introduced, which made the contribution in time of peace contingent upon the establishment of a balance between revenue and expenditure. The hereditary revenue was now 652,000 l. and was steadily rising. The new resolution provided that whatever surplus it produced ‘above the sum of 656,000 l. in each year of peace wherein the annual revenue shall equal the annual expense, and in each year of war without regard to such equality, should be appropriated towards the support of the naval force of the Empire in such manner as the Parliament of this kingdom shall direct.’ 1

Sydney, in a secret letter to Rutland, expressed his strong dislike to this concession to the views of Grattan, 2 but the English Government took no step to disavow their representatives in Ireland, and Rutland himself urgently maintained that the new condition was both necessary, politic, and just. ‘The continued accumulation of debt and the providing for it by annual loans must be acknowledged to be a ruinous system. The extent to which these loans have already arrived in the last nine or ten years has sunk the value of Government four per cent. debentures, which were above par, to eighty-eight per cent. … ‘When the nation, instead of applying the redundancy of its revenues to the discharge of its incumbrances, agrees to appropriate that redundancy to the general expenses of the Empire, it cannot be thought unjust that it should at the same time restrain the Government from running into debt.’ 3

Though the resolutions were vehemently opposed in the House of Commons by Flood and a few other members, and though there were a few hostile petitions from manufacturers who desired protecting duties and who saw that all chance of obtaining them was now likely to disappear, they encountered no serious or formidable difficulty, and at last passed through the Irish Parliament with a general concurrence. Grattan in a few words commended them as not only strengthening the Empire, but also securing the great end of a sound and honest financial administration, by interesting both the British and Irish Ministers in Irish economy. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is open, fair, and just, and such as the British Minister can justify to both nations.’ 1 One of the first consequences of the resolutions was a motion which was introduced by Foster, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and carried by a large majority, imposing restrictions on the grants to manufactures, charities, and public works, which had hitherto been lavishly and often corruptly voted, 2 and the Parliament then imposed additional taxes estimated to produce 140,000 l. a year for the purpose of enabling Ireland to fulfil her part in the transaction and showing that she had no desire to evade the obligation of a contribution. 3

The popular portion of the House appears to have, with very few exceptions, fully concurred with the Government, and there was no sign of serious disturbance in the country. There was, undoubtedly, a party among the manufacturers who hated with a desperate hatred the notion of free trade; but it had little political power, and it would on the whole perhaps not be too much to say that economical opinion at this time was more enlightened in Ireland than in England. The manner in which new arguments are received often depends much less upon their intrinsic weight, than upon the disposition of the hearers, and circumstances had given English mercantile opinion a strong bias towards monopoly, and Irish opinion an almost equal bias towards free trade. The great, ancient, and wealthy industries of England, largely represented in the Imperial Parliament, fortified in all directions by laws of privilege, and commanding the markets of all the subordinate portions of the Empire, were very naturally marked out by their circumstances as the champions of monopoly, and their representatives regarded the advantages of the protective system as self-evident. The arguments of Hume and of Adam Smith appeared to them the mere subtleties of unpractical theorists, glaringly opposed to the dictates of common sense, and belonging to the same category as the speculations which denied the existence of matter, or of free will, or of a sense of right and wrong in man. The whole commercial history of Ireland, on the other hand, since the Restoration, had been a desperate struggle against commercial restrictions, and Irish thinkers were therefore prepared to welcome the new school of writers, who maintained that a policy of commercial restriction was universally and essentially unsound.

The resolutions passed to England, and were introduced by Pitt on February 22, in a speech of masterly power; but it soon appeared that they were destined to encounter a most formidable opposition. Fox and North at once denounced the propositions as ruinous to English commerce, and all over England the commercial classes were soon arrayed in the most violent opposition to the plan. Delegates of manufacturers from all England met in London, and, chiefly under the direction of the illustrious Wedgwood, they formed themselves into a permanent association called ‘The Great Chamber of the Manufacturers of Great Britain,’ for watching over their interests. Petitions poured in from every important manufacturing centre in England and Scotland. Liverpool led the way; a petition from Lancashire bearing 80,000 signatures was laid on the floor of the House, and in a short time no less than sixty-two other petitions were presented. They alleged that the low taxes, and the low price of labour, in Ireland, would make anything like free trade ruinous to English manufacturers; that the English trader would be driven, not only out of the Irish, but even out of his own market; that the English manufacturer would be obliged in self-defence to transfer his works and capital to Ireland, and they clamorously demanded to be heard by counsel against the scheme.

Nearly twelve weeks were expended in hearing evidence against it, and during all that time the opposition in England was growing stronger and stronger. It was certain that the resolutions in their present form would not be carried, and when Pitt again brought forward the scheme in May 1785, the original eleven resolutions had expanded into twenty. Some of these related to patents, copyright of books, and the right of fishing on the British coast, and were open to little or no objection; but others modified the plan most seriously to the detriment of Ireland. Even after the expiration of the present charter of the East India Company, and as long as England thought fit to maintain any such company, Ireland was precluded from carrying on any direct trade with any part of the world, whether English or foreign, beyond the Cape of Good Hope, to the Straits of Magellan, and from importing any goods of the growth, produce, or manufacture of India, except through Great Britain. She was prohibited from importing to England arrack, rum, foreign brandy, and strong waters, which did not come from the British West Indies. She was to be compelled to enact without delay, and without modification, all laws which either had been made, or which for the future should be made, by the British Parliament respecting navigation, all existing and future British laws regulating and restraining the trade of the British colonies and plantations, and all laws either prohibiting or imposing duties upon goods and commodities imported from either the British or foreign colonies, Africa, or America. The same regulating power of the British Parliament was extended to all goods exported from Ireland to the British colonies of America and the West Indies, and even to a portion of the trade with the United States of America. 1 With very few exceptions the same laws and restrictions would apply to the English and Irish trade; but the circumstances of the two countries were so widely different, that it was easy to show that they would often be most unequal in their operation, and it was for the British Parliament alone to determine the laws relating to navigation, to the trade with the English colonies, to the trade with the foreign plantations, and to part of the trade with the United Sates. On all these subjects the right of legislation was virtually transferred or abdicated, for the Irish Parliament would have no propounding, deliberative, negative, or legislative power, and would be obliged simply to register the enactments of the Parliament in England.

Even in their modified form the commercial resolutions were bitterly opposed by Fox, North, Burke, and Sheridan; and Eden, whose authority on commercial matters was very great, was on the same side. Burke, though he was by no means an unqualified opponent of the propositions, 1 described one part of them as a repetition of the English policy in America—another attempt by the mother country, through the medium of Parliament, to raise a revenue by legislative regulations. 2 Fox and Sheridan declared that the resolutions went to the complete destruction of the commerce, manufacture, revenue, and mercantile strength of England, and they at the same time, while constituting themselves the especial champions of English commercial jealousy, did their utmost to excite Irish feeling against the scheme. They described it as a plan to make Ireland tributary to England, and as involving a complete surrender of the power of exclusive legislation, which Ireland so highly prized. It was, as Sheridan truly said, ‘unquestionably a proposal on the part of the British Parliament, that Ireland should, upon certain conditions, surrender her now acknowledged right of external legislation, and return, as to that point, to the situation from which she had emancipated herself in 1782.’ It bound Ireland, said Fox, to impose restraints ‘undefined, unspecified, and uncertain, at the arbitrary demand of another State,’ and Fox concluded his denunciation by a skilful sentence, which appealed at once to the jealousy of both countries. ‘I will not,’ he said, ‘barter English commerce for Irish slavery; that is not the price I would pay, nor is this the thing I would purchase.’

Pitt exerted both his eloquence and his influence to the utmost, and at last, after a fierce debate which continued till past 8 A.M., 3 the resolutions were carried by great majorities through the English Parliament. It would probably have been on the whole to the advantage of Ireland even now to have accepted them, but we can hardly, I think, blame the Irish Parliament for its reluctance to do so. Pitt, in endeavouring to make them acceptable to England, had been obliged to argue that the industrial ascendency of England was such that serious Irish competition was little short of an impossibility, while the opposition in England had loudly proclaimed that the project was completely subversive of Irish independence. The resolutions to which the Irish Parliament had agreed were returned to it in a wholly altered form, and all the more important alterations were expressly directed against Irish interests, and tended to establish the ascendency of the British Parliament over Irish navigation and commerce. The very essence of the Constitution of 1782 was that the Irish Parliament possessed an exclusive right to legislate for Ireland commercially and externally, as well as internally, and it was this right which, three years after its establishment, Ireland was virtually asked in a great measure to surrender. The price, or at least a part of the price, which was asked for the commercial benefits that might be expected, was the relinquishment by Ireland of her full right of regulating her trade with foreign countries, and the restoration to the British Legislature of a large power of legislating for Ireland. It was said, indeed, that the new restrictions did not differ essentially, and in kind, from those under which Ireland had already accepted the trade to the English plantations, but it was answered that they at least differed enormously in the extent and uncertainty of the obligations imposed on future Irish legislation; in their interference with the rights of the Irish Parliament to regulate its foreign trade. It was said, too, that Ireland might at any time abandon the compact and regain her liberty; but once an intricate commercial system is established, it is often very difficult to withdraw from it, and as long as it continued, the hands of the Irish Parliament on many of the ordinary subjects of legislation would be completely tied. Grattan now denounced the scheme with fiery eloquence as fatal to that Irish Constitution which he valued even more than the British Empire. 1 Flood, once more, warmly co-operated with him. Several members on the Treasury Bench supported him. Petitions against the scheme flowed in from the great towns, and at last, after a debate which lasted continuously for more than seventeen hours and did not terminate till nine A.M., the House only granted leave to bring in a Bill based on the twenty resolutions, by 127 to 108. 2 Such a division at the first stage of the Bill, and in a House in which the Government usually commanded overwhelming majorities, was equivalent to a defeat; at the next meeting of Parliament, Orde announced his intention not to make any further progress with the Bill, and that night Dublin was illuminated in attestation of the popular joy.