the British Parliament. The first of these positions is your security, the second your freedom, and any other language tends to the separation of the crowns or the subjection of your Parliament. The only security of your liberty is the connection with Great Britain; and gentlemen who risk breaking the connection must make up their minds to a union. God forbid I should ever see that day; but, if the day comes on which a separation shall be attempted, I shall not hesitate to embrace a union rather than a separation.'
He proceeded to show that, as the Irish Parliament had itself enacted that all bills which passed their two Houses should require the sanction of the Great Seal of England, they actually had no legal power to confer on the Prince of Wales such authority as Grattan advised his being invested with, whatever might be the form of words in which their resolution was couched. He pointed out, also, that if the Irish Parliament should insist on appointing the Prince of Wales Regent before it was known whether he would accept the Regency of England, it was manifestly not impossible 'that they might be appointing a Regent for Ireland being a different person from the Regent of England; and in that case the moment a Regent was appointed in Great Britain, he might send a commission under the Great Seal appointing a Lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and to that commission the Regent of Ireland would be bound to pay obedience. Another objection of great force to his mind was, that the course recommended by Grattan would be a formal appeal from the Parliament of England to that of Ireland. It would sow the seeds of dissension between the Parliaments of the two countries. And, indeed, those who were professing themselves advocates for the independence of the Irish crown were advocates for its separation from England.'
But the House was too entirely under the influence of Grattan's impassioned eloquence for Fitzgibbon's more sober arguments to be listened to. The address proposed by Grattan was carried by acclamation; and the peers were scarcely less unanimous in its favor, one of the archbishops even dilating on 'the duty of availing themselves of the opportunity of asserting the total independence of Ireland.' Even when, on a second discussion as to the mode in which the address was to be presented to the Prince, Fitzgibbon reported that he had consulted the Chancellor and all the judges, and that they were unanimously of opinion that, till the Regency Bill should be passed in England, the address was not only improper but treasonable, he found his warning equally disregarded. And when the Lord-lieutenant refused to transmit the address to England, on the avowed ground of its illegality, Grattan proposed and carried three resolutions: the first, that the address was not illegal, but that, in addressing the Prince to take on himself the Regency, the Parliament of Ireland had exercised an undoubted right; the second, that the Lord-lieutenant's refusal to transmit the address to his Royal Highness was ill-advised and unconstitutional; the third, that a deputation from the two Houses should go to London, to present the address to the Prince. Mr. Fronde affirms that the deputation, even when preparing to sail for England, was very irresolute and undecided whether to present the address or not, from a reasonable fear of incurring the penalties of treason, to which the lawyers pronounced those who should present it liable. But their courage was not put to the test. As has been already seen, before the end of the month the King's recovery was announced, and the question of a Regency did not occur again till the Irish Parliament had been united to the English.
Since Lord Rockingham's concessions, in 1782, the project of a legislative union between the two countries, resembling that which united Scotland to England, had more than once been broached. We have seen it alluded to by Fitzgibbon in the course of these discussions, and it was no new idea. It had been discussed even before the union with Scotland was completed, and had then been regarded in Ireland with feelings very different from those which prevailed at a later period. Ten years after the time of which we are speaking, Grattan denounced the scheme with almost frantic violence. Fitzgibbon (though after the Rebellion he recommended it as indispensable) as yet regarded it only as an alternative which, though he might eventually embrace it, he should not accept without extreme reluctance. But at the beginning of the century all parties among the Protestant Irish had been eager for it, and even the leading Roman Catholics had been not unwilling to acquiesce in it. Unluckily, the English ministers were unable to shake off the influence of the English manufacturers; and they, in another development of the selfish and wicked jealousy which had led them in William's reign to require the suppression of the Irish woollen manufacture, now, in Anne's, rose against the proposal of a legislative union.[133] In blindness which was not only fatal but suicidal also, 'they persuaded themselves that the union would make Ireland rich, and that England's interest was to keep her poor;' as if it had been possible for one portion of the kingdom to increase in prosperity without every other portion benefiting also by the improvement.
However, in the reign of Anne the union was a question only of expediency or of wisdom. The wide divergence of the two Parliaments on this question of the Regency transformed it into a question of necessity. The King might have a relapse; the Irish Parliament, on a recurrence of the crisis, might re-affirm its late resolutions; might frame another address to the Prince of Wales; and there might be no alternative between seeing two different persons Regents of England and Ireland, or, what would be nearly the same thing, seeing the same person Regent of the two countries on different grounds, and exercising a different authority.
And if these proceedings of the Irish Parliament had wrought in the mind of the great English minister a conviction of the absolute necessity of preventing a recurrence of such dangers by the only practicable means open to him-the fusion of it into one body with the English Parliament by a legislative union-the occurrences of the ensuing ten years enforced that conviction with a weight still more irresistible. It has been seen how stirring an influence the revolutionary fever engendered by the overthrow of the French monarchy for a time exerted even over the calmer temper of Englishmen. In Ireland, where, ever since Sarsfield and his brave garrison enlisted under the banner of Louis XIV., a connection more or less intimate with France had been constantly kept up, the events in Paris had produced a far deeper and wider effect. More than one demagogue among the Volunteers had avowed a desire to see the whole country transfer its allegiance from the English to the French sovereign; and this preference was more pronounced after the triumph of democracy in the French capital. For the leaders of the movement, themselves nearly all men of the lowest degree, denounced the Irish nobles with almost as much vehemence as the English connection.
Yet Pitt's policy, dictated partly by a spirit of conciliation, and still more by feelings of justice, was gradually removing many of the grievances of which the Irish had real reason to complain. Next to the restrictions on trade, nothing had made such an impression on his mind as the iniquity of the penal laws; and those he proceeded to repeal, encouraging the introduction of bills to throw open the profession of the law to Roman Catholics, to allow them seats on the magistrates' bench and commissions in the army, and to grant them the electoral franchise, a concession which he himself would willingly have extended by admitting them to Parliament itself. But these relaxations of the old Penal Code, important as they were, only conciliated the higher classes of the Roman Catholics. Most of the Roman Catholic prelates, and most of the Roman Catholic lay nobles, proclaimed their satisfaction at what had been done, and their good-will toward the minister who had done it; but the professional agitators were exasperated rather than conciliated at finding so much of the ground on which they had rested cut from beneath their feet. So desirous was Pitt to carry conciliation to the greatest length that could be consistent with safety, that he held more than one conference with Grattan himself; but he found that great orator not very manageable, partly, as it may seem from some of Mr. Windham's letters, through jealousy of Fitzgibbon, who was now the Irish Chancellor,[134] and still more from a desire to propitiate the Roman Catholics, for whom he demanded complete and immediate Emancipation; while Pitt, who was, probably, already resolved on accomplishing a legislative Union, thought, as far as we can judge, that Emancipation should follow, not precede, the Union, lest, if it should precede it, it might prove rather a stumbling-block in the way than a stepping-stone to the still more important measure.
It is not very easy to determine what influence the 'Emancipation,' as it was rather absurdly called,[135] if it had been granted at that time, might have had in quieting the prevailing discontent. With one large party it would probably have increased it, for there was quite as great an inclination to insurrection in Ulster as in Leinster or Munster; and with the Northern Presbyterians animosity to Popery was at least as powerful a feeling as sympathy with the French Republicans. A subsequent chapter, however, will afford a more fitting opportunity for discussing the arguments in favor of or against Emancipation. What seems certain is, that a large party among the Roman Catholics of the lower class valued Emancipation itself principally as a measure to another end-a separation from England. Pitt, meanwhile, hopeless of reconciling the leaders of the different parties-the impulsive enthusiasm of Grattan with the sober, practical wisdom of Fitzgibbon-pursued his own policy of conciliation united with vigor; and one of the measures which he now carried subsists, unaltered in its principle, to the present day.
There was no part of the penal laws of which the folly and iniquity were more intolerable than the restrictions which they imposed on education. To a certain extent, they defeated themselves. The clause which subjected to severe penalties a Roman Catholic parent who sent his child abroad to enjoy the benefits of an education which he was not allowed to receive at home, was manifestly almost incapable of enforcement, and the youths designed for
