wiser government than that of Lord North would have avoided giving occasion for the existence of a force which the utter absence of any other had made masters of the situation. The Volunteers even boasted that they had been called into existence by English misgovernment. In the words of one of their most eloquent advocates, 'England had sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they had sprung up as armed men.'
Ireland began to feel that she was strong, and, not unnaturally desired to avail herself of that strength, which England now could not question, to put forward demands for concessions which in common fairness could not well be denied. In 1778, when Lord North, in the hope of recovering the allegiance of the North American Colonies, brought forward what he termed his conciliatory propositions, the Irish members began to press their demand that the advantages thus offered to the Americans should be extended to their own countrymen also; that the fact of the Irish not having rebelled should not be made a plea for treating them worse than those who had; and in the front of all their requests was one for the abolition of those unjust and vexatious duties which shackled their trade and manufactures. But the jealousy of the English and Scotch manufacturers was still as bitter, and, unhappily, still as influential, as it had proved in the time of William III. And, to humor the grasping selfishness of Manchester and Glasgow, Lord North met the demands of the Irish with a refusal of which every word of his speech on the propositions to America was the severest condemnation, and which he sought to mitigate by some new regulations in favor of the linen trade, to which the English and Scotch manufacturers made no objection, since they had no linen factories. The Irish, in despair, had recourse to non-importation agreements, of which the Americans had set the example, binding themselves not to import nor to use any articles of English or Scotch manufacture with which they could possibly dispense. And the result was, that Lord North yielded to fear what he had refused to justice, and the next year brought in bills to grant the Irish the commercial equality which they demanded. Some of the most oppressive and vexatious of the penal laws were also relaxed; and some restrictions which the Navigation Act imposed on commerce with the West Indies were repealed. But, strange to say, the English ministers still clung to one grievance of monstrous injustice, and steadily refused to allow judicial appointments to be placed on the same footing as in England, and to make the seat of a judge on the bench depend on his own good conduct, instead of on the caprice of a king or a minister.
But the manifest reluctance with which the English government had granted this partial relief encouraged the demand for farther concessions. The Irish members, rarely deficient in eloquence or fertility of resource, had been lately re-enforced by a recruit of pre-eminent powers, whom Lord Charlemont had returned for his borough of Moy, Henry Grattan; and, led by him, began to insist that the remaining grievances, to the removal of which the nation had a right, would never be extinguished so long as the supreme power of legislation for the country rested with the English and Scotch Parliament; and that the true remedy was only to be found in the restoration to the Irish Parliament of that independence of which it had been deprived ever since the time of Henry VII. They were encouraged by the visibly increasing weakness of Lord North's administration. Throughout the year 1781 it was evidently tottering to its fall. And on the 22d of February, 1782, Grattan brought forward in the Irish House of Commons a resolution, intended, if carried, to lay the foundation of a bill, 'that a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to bind this kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance.' This resolution aimed at the abolition of Poynings' Act. Other resolutions demanded the abolition of the 'powers exercised by the Privy Council under color of Poynings' Act,' and a farther relaxation of the penal laws. So helpless did the government by this time feel itself, that the Attorney-general, who was its spokesman on this occasion, could not venture to resist the principle of these resolutions, but was contented to elude them for the time by objections taken to some of the details; and Grattan gave notice of another motion to bring the question to a more definite decision, which he fixed for the 16th of April.
Before that day came Lord North's government had ceased to exist, and had been replaced by Lord Rockingham's, one most influential member of which was the most distinguished of living Irishmen, Mr. Burke, who, while in opposition, had always shown himself a warm supporter of the claims of his countrymen, and was not likely to have his ardor in the cause damped by being placed in a situation where he could procure a friendly hearing to his counsels. Once more they had increased their demands, requiring, besides the removal of the purely political grievances, a surrender of the right of appeal from the Irish to the English courts of law. But their new masters were inclined to grant everything which seemed requisite to the establishment of complete equality between the two kingdoms; and though the new ministry was dissolved in a few months by the premature death of its chief, he lived long enough to carry the repeal of Poynings' Act, the retention of which was now admitted to be not only senseless but mischievous, since the existence of a body invested with nominal dignity, but practically powerless, was calculated not only to provoke discontent, but to furnish a lever for agitation.
The repeal was, however, nothing less than the establishment of an entirely new constitution in Ireland. The Irish Parliament, the meetings of which had hitherto been a mere form and farce, was installed in a position of absolute independence, to grant money or to make laws, subject to no other condition than that their legislation should be of a character to entitle it to the royal assent, a condition to which every act of the British Parliament was likewise and equally liable. 'Unhappily, as an Irish patriotic writer exclaims on this occasion, it was written in the book of fate that the felicity of Ireland should be short-lived.'[129] And a similar shortness of existence was to be the lot of the separate independence of her Parliament. Even while framing instructions for the Lord-lieutenant, in his honest desire to inaugurate a system of just government for Ireland, George III. had warned him on no account to 'summon a Parliament without his special command.'[130] And, regarded by the light of subsequent events, it can hardly be denied that the prohibition displayed an accurate insight into the real difficulties of the country, and also into the character of the people themselves as the source of at least some of those difficulties. We ought not to judge its leaders too severely. A nation which has been long kept in bondage, and is suddenly presented with liberty, is hardly more able to bear the change than a man immured for years in a dark dungeon can at once endure the unveiled light of the sun; and independence had been granted to the Irish too suddenly for it to be probable that they would at once and in every instance exercise it wisely.
All parties were to blame in different degrees. The first danger came from the Volunteers, who, flushed with self-importance, from the belief that it was the imposing show of their strength which had enabled the Parliament to extort Lord Rockingham's concession from the English Houses, now claimed to be masters of the Parliament itself. With the termination of the American war, and the consequent return of the English army to Europe, the reason for their existence had passed away. But they refused to be disbanded, and established a convention of armed delegates, to sit in Dublin during the session of Parliament, and to overawe the Houses into passing a series of measures which they prescribed, and which included a Parliamentary Reform Bill of a most sweeping character. On this occasion, however, the House of Commons acted with laudable firmness. Led by Mr. Fitzgibbon, a man of great powers, and above all suspicion of corruptibility, it spurned the dictation of an unauthorized body, and rejected the Reform Bill, avowedly on the ground of its being presented to it 'under the mandate of a military congress;' and the Convention, finding itself powerless to enforce its mandates, dissolved.
But the difficulties of the government were not over with the suppression of the Volunteer Convention. The Lord-lieutenant had a harder, because a more enduring, contest to encounter with the Parliament and the patrons of the boroughs. A single act of Parliament may substitute a new law for an old one; but no one resolution or bill has a magical power to extinguish long habits of jobbery and corruption. Members and patrons alike seemed to regard the late concessions as chiefly valuable on account of the increased value which it enabled them to place on their services to the government; and one cannot read without a feeling of shame that one or two of the bishops who were wont to be regarded as the proprietors of the seats for their diocesan cities, were not behind the most nameless lay boroughmongers in the resolution they evinced make a market of their support of the government. The consequence was that the government was unable to feel confident of its power to carry any measure except at a price that it was degrading to pay; while of those few members who were above all suspicion of personal corruption, many were so utterly wrong-headed, and had their minds so filled with unreasonable jealousy for what they called the honor and dignity of Ireland, and with a consequent distrust of England and of all Englishmen, that their honest folly was even a greater obstacle to wise and good government than the mean cunning of the others. There can hardly be a more striking proof of the difficulties to be overcome by a minister than is furnished by a speech made by a gentleman of the highest character, and of deservedly wide influence in the Northern counties, Mr. Brownlow, of Lurgan, one of the members for Armagh, which is quoted by Mr. Froude.[131]
Pitt was painfully conscious of the commercial injustice with which hitherto Ireland had always been treated, and in the very first year of his administration he applied himself to the removal of the most mischievous of the grievances of which the Irish merchants complained, adopting to a great extent a scheme which had been put before him by one of the most considerable gentlemen of that body, which was based on the principle of
