Irish History And The Irish Question Part 5

The Penal Code had ere this lost much of its cruelty. Time, security, and intercourse had softened the feeling of the Protestants against the Catholics, whose pa.s.sive loyalty had been proved by their inaction when Great Britain was twice invaded by Stuart pretenders. The most odious enactments of the code, those which involved personal degradation and outrage on family affection, had fallen into desuetude or been evaded.

Protestant friends would hold land for a Catholic in confidential trust, and ostensibly a.s.sume the guardianship of his children, leaving the real guardianship to the kin. The attempts of informers to take advantage of forfeitures were discouraged by the courts. Protestant fanaticism was dying out everywhere except in rural Ulster, and was giving way among the educated to indifference and even to scepticism. The spirit of Voltaire was abroad. Chesterfield, as viceroy, brought it with him, laughing at religious intolerance, and saying that the only Catholic of whom he was afraid was the reigning beauty of Dublin. The whole system of the Catholic Church, though still nominally subsisting only by connivance, was openly and securely carried on. Conspicuous Ma.s.s houses were built. The Catholic hierarchy and priesthood were forming friendly relations with a government which had once designated all Catholics as enemies. Catholics of the upper cla.s.s educated in France came back from the land of the Encyclopaedists tinctured with its liberalism. Catholics were admitted by connivance into Trinity College. A central committee had been formed to guard Catholic interests, which in the penal era would have been treason. After 1782, relief bills were pa.s.sed. Catholicism was recognized by law. All restrictions upon the maintenance of the hierarchy, freedom of ordination, or additions to the priesthood were abrogated. Catholics were made capable of acquiring property in land, though under the guise of leases for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. The Gavelling Act, pa.s.sed to break up their estates, was repealed. It was unfortunately too late to restore the Catholic gentry, which had been decimated by the Penal Law. In 1783 a bill was pa.s.sed opening to Catholics the profession of the law in all its branches and grades except the rank of king's counsel and the judicial bench, repealing the law against the intermarriage of Catholics with Protestants, that against foreign emigration, that making an Anglican license necessary for schools, and that restricting the number of apprentices permitted in Catholic trade. The laws against the possession of arms and the exclusion from command in the army were left. Otherwise of the Penal Code the political disabilities almost alone remained.

The princ.i.p.al relief bill was introduced by Sir Hercules Langrishe, the friend and correspondent on Irish politics of Burke, who pleaded the cause of the Irish Catholics with all the vehemence of his nature, a measure of sympathy with the religion probably mingling in his heart with love of freedom and justice. Burke had less feeling for the grievances of Protestant Dissenters or of Anglican clergymen liberally inclined, who sought the relaxation of tests. He afterwards sent his son, whose ability he fondly overrated, as his representative to Ireland, in the affairs of which the aspiring youth meddled, and with farcical results.

The Presbyterians of Belfast had before this been relieved of the Test Act and their other religious bonds and humiliations. But the relief had come too late to turn them into good friends of the Anglican Church or of British connection. Revolutionary and republican sentiment had, with religious scepticism, taken root in Belfast.

The revolution of 1782 had not been democratic. The Volunteers were property holders and their leaders were peers. But the withdrawal of the Volunteers was not followed by political calm. Among the populace of Dublin, especially, excitement continued and showed itself detestably by hamstringing British soldiers. The cry was now for two drastic measures of change: the political emanc.i.p.ation of the Catholics, and a reform of Parliament subst.i.tuting freedom of election for nomination and clearing the legislature of pensioners and placemen. The two combined evidently meant death to Protestant ascendancy and to oligarchy, both of which naturally shrank from suicide.

The struggle grew fierce, and now not only was the American Revolution fresh in recollection, but the French Revolution, advancing with thunder tread, was filling the minds of the people everywhere, and especially those of the oppressed and suffering, with vague visions and hopes of change. Even to the hovel of the Irish serf, a vague hope, not of a society regenerated on the principles of Rousseau, but of deliverance from the middleman, from the t.i.the-proctor, and from the English connection, which he thought was at the bottom of all his sufferings, had begun to make its way.

Of reform, the leader was Grattan. Opposition to reform found a mighty champion in Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, a strong man, fearless as he was able, and a very powerful speaker, but violent and overbearing, as well as reactionary to a degree which charms the reactionary historian.

Fitzgibbon had a very coa.r.s.e but rather effective shield-bearer in Dr.

Duigenan, the son of a Catholic farmer intended for the priesthood, but captured by the Protestant clergyman of his parish.

Grattan and the reform party failed to get admission for Catholics to Parliament. They failed to purify the House itself by subst.i.tuting free election for nomination boroughs, or by the effective exclusion of pensioners and placemen from the House. They succeeded in extending the electoral franchise to all holders, whether Catholic or Protestant, of forty-shilling freeholds. Unfortunately, they could hardly have done worse than by giving political power to the ma.s.s without its natural leaders.

Protestant demagogues playing for the Catholic vote were certain to appear. Another bad effect of the measure was the multiplication of cotter holdings by land-owners who would absolutely control the cotter's vote. On the other hand, to ask the Protestant oligarchy to part with its exclusive possession of Parliament was to ask it, not only to resign power, but even to cast a shadow on its property, for the Act of Settlement had hardly even yet become perfectly sacred as the t.i.tle-deed of proprietary right.

Not all the advocates of Parliamentary reform were in favour of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. Flood among others was opposed to it.

Of the British government Pitt was now absolute master. Early in his reign he had glanced at Irish politics and it seems had thought of union. But the Channel was still wide and Irish government was still left to the Castle. Pitt, however, had tendered Ireland a commercial agreement framed, like his commercial treaty with France, in the spirit of the first statesman who read Adam Smith. Introduced by him with great ability and at first with general acceptance, his measure in the end was wrecked by a combination of British protectionism, Whig faction, and Irish jealousy on the subject of legislative independence; to the last of which Fox, carried away by faction, scrupled not to appeal. Commercial union would have strengthened the political connection, and by furthering commercial prosperity might have done something to allay Irish discontent. Latterly, Pitt's thoughts had been engrossed by the struggle with France. They were now turned perforce to the political state of Ireland, which was evidently becoming very perilous; at that time, unfortunately, with no happy result.

The Whigs opposed to the French Revolution, Portland, Spencer, Fitzwilliam, and Windham, had coalesced with Pitt without renouncing their general principles, which they wished to apply to Ireland, regarding that field, it seems, as especially their own. At their instance Fitzwilliam was sent over as viceroy, believing, and it seems with reason, that he bore Catholic emanc.i.p.ation and general reform in his hand; though he had no written instructions, nor, it appears, any verbal instructions sufficiently clear. He went hastily to work, opened his budget of concessions prematurely, and too promptly brandished the besom of administrative reform, dismissing from office one of the great place-hunting house of Beresford, which by a.s.siduous intrigue had filled the public service with its nominees. The Beresford carried his plaint to the headquarters of the Tory party in London, and told Pitt that Fitzwilliam was turning out all the faithful supporters of the government.

What followed is still a mystery. There was a long, unaccountable, and apparently inexcusable silence on the part of Portland, broken at last by disclaimer, rebuke, and recall. Fitzwilliam, stung to fury at this treatment, trampled on official rules and did serious mischief by his publication of confidential letters betraying an incipient design of union, which to Irish patriotism at that time was maddening. At the bottom of all the misunderstanding and trouble was the king, into whose miserable mind had been instilled, it appears by Fitzgibbon, the belief that by consenting to Catholic emanc.i.p.ation he would break his coronation oath.

The two great Tory lawyers, Eldon and Kenyon, to their honour, told the king the truth. It seems probable, however, that the union of the coalition government was imperfect, as that of coalition governments is apt to be, and that this may be the account both of the want of clearness in Fitzwilliam's original instructions and of the strange silence, ending at last in an abrupt dismissal, which ensued.

Fitzwilliam left Dublin amidst pa.s.sionate demonstrations of popular disappointment and grief. His place was taken by Lord Camden, one of the Tory section of the Pitt government, who came to face Irish rebellion aided by Revolutionary France, while England, placed in extreme peril by French victories and the secession of her allies, was struggling for her life and was unable to afford military support to the government of Ireland.

Catholic emanc.i.p.ation and reform of Parliament, had Fitzwilliam been allowed to grant them, would, Grattan thought, have averted the crisis.

They might have staved it off, but it would probably have come in another form. That the new power thus called into being would be as loyal as Grattan himself to British connection was a highly precarious a.s.sumption.

The course of the French Revolution would have not been stayed, nor would the wild hopes which it excited have been extinguished. The aspirations of Tom Paine's disciples at Belfast would not have ceased. The cotter's hunger would not have been appeased nor would he have been reconciled to the payment of t.i.the and Church cess. The blind hatred of British connection as the supposed source of all evil to Ireland would have continued to work. The State Church would at once have been attacked. The Castle government, bereft of its two supports, nomination boroughs and patronage, would inevitably have lost its hold. Chaos would then have come. Material order might have been preserved by a sufficient military force. Otherwise there was apparently nothing for it but union.

In Presbyterian Belfast, hatred of the State Church and the English government which supported it, bred by Episcopal intolerance, had developed, especially among the young men, into rationalism and acceptance of the doctrines, both religious and political, of Tom Paine. The connection of sympathy with the exiles in America had been kept up, and the spirit of the American was combined with that of the French Revolution. Thus was formed the circle of United Irishmen. The professed aim of this a.s.sociation, perhaps originally its real aim, was only the reform of Parliament. But it soon became revolutionary, aiming at independence of England and the foundation of an Irish republic, to be brought about by the aid of revolutionary France. Its soul was Wolfe Tone, a young man of talent, literary and practical, and of generous instincts, wild, dissipated, recklessly adventurous, burning with hatred of England.

Other leading members of the circle were Jackson and Emmett. Most of the set were plebeian. But there was one recruit from the aristocracy, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster, fired, like Lafayette, with the enthusiasm of liberty, but distinguished and made an object of sentimental interest only by his rank and by his tragical end.

The outbreak was now imminent. Grattan, with his few steadfast adherents, seceded from Parliament, where he had better have stayed to moderate as far as he could the fury of repression. This he owed to the country on which he had imposed the const.i.tution of 1782, a system fraught, as he might have seen, with disruption and capable of being worked only as it had been worked, by Castle influence. The bond of loyalty to England, which was strong in his own breast, he a.s.sumed to be general. Neither he nor, with reverence be it said, Burke, excellent as the general principles of both might be, correctly read the situation, which was one of a very special kind. Burke's letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on the subject of religious emanc.i.p.ation is accounted one of the greatest of his works. But Fitzgibbon might with reason have replied to it that of the real Irish problem it offered no practical solution. It did not show how a national Parliament of Ireland, with a great Catholic majority, and uncontrolled by Castle patronage and influence, to which reform would have put an end, could be kept in secure harmony with the Parliament of Great Britain.

Burke, however, now and then, glances timidly at the policy of union.

Grattan could think of nothing but his two Parliaments linked by eternal affection. After Grattan's secession, the oligarchy closed its ranks, and the Parliament thenceforth went thoroughly with the government, or even beyond it, in the policy of repression.

The Castle understood its danger. In Irish conspiracies the informer is never lacking. Besides, there were Catholics, who though patriots, wishing to avert civil war, communicated with the government, and furnished it with information for that purpose. Among these may fairly be numbered Arthur O'Leary, on whose connection with the government and acceptance of a small pension from it, lately revealed, prejudice pounces as a proof that the best reputed and most eminent of Irish Liberals was a rogue.

Arthur O'Leary wrote well, and the spirit of his writings was thoroughly liberal as well as loyal. Nothing seems to have been expected of him beyond general information of Catholic tendencies and movements such as one who desired to avert civil war might honestly give. By its secret intelligence the government was enabled at a critical moment to seize some of the leaders of the conspiracy, while Lord Edward Fitzgerald met his death in resisting arrest.

The fire, smouldering everywhere, burst into a flame in Armagh, a Protestant district into which Catholics had intruded by outbidding Protestant holders of farms whose leases had expired. The Protestants, banding together under the name of Peep o'Day Boys, proceeded to oust the intruders, burning some of their houses. The Catholics combined for mutual protection under the name of Defenders. Outrages were committed on both sides. In a pitched battle, on a small scale, called the battle of the Diamond, the Catholics were worsted and a number of them were killed. Many Catholics were driven from their homes, and the fugitives spread through the country the belief that the Protestants were bent on extermination.

The United Irishmen, disciples of Tom Paine, cared nothing for the quarrels of sects. But disaffection of any kind was grist to their revolutionary mill. They coalesced with Defenderism, and by superior intelligence got control of the movement, which they organized as an expectant army of revolution. Their task was made easy by the habits of conspiracy formed among the peasantry in the agrarian war. There were secret oaths, pa.s.swords, military gradations of command. There were even reviews under pretence of digging the potatoes of patriots who were in prison. Everything was ready for a rising as soon as French succour should appear. All the blacksmiths were making pike-heads, the young trees were being everywhere cut down for the shafts. Muskets in plenty would come with the auxiliary army from France. Wolfe Tone had visited Paris, of which in its revolutionary phase he gives a lively picture, and received a promise of aid; Hoche, with whom he had an interview, being eager for the enterprise.

Among the people generally the rebellion was agrarian rather than religious, religious only as the Catholic peasantry believed that they saw in Protestantism a badge of general enmity. But that belief made the war between the sects internecine. It does not appear that any but a few of the lowest and coa.r.s.est of the priesthood took an active part in the rebellion. The order, as a whole, could hardly look with pleasure for the conquest of Ireland by an atheist revolution. The French, in fact, had they become masters of Ireland for a time, would probably in the end have found themselves there, as in Spain, confronted by a hostile priesthood carrying with it the people.

In the extremity of danger, surrounded by gathering rebellion, Castle government had now to strike or fall. It struck, practically proclaiming martial law. But it was without the only safe means of military repression. Of regular soldiers it had few. Those few behaved well. Some of them earned by their conduct the blessings of the people. But in the main repression had to be entrusted to yeomanry and fencibles, little controlled by discipline, and infected, as a militia is always apt to be, and as in this case they were in an extreme degree, by the pa.s.sions of the hour. These men, sent forth to disarm the people, in their search for concealed arms burned, slew, pitch-capped, flogged without stint or mercy, and turned a great district of the north and midland into a h.e.l.l. The people retaliated with equal atrocity where they had the power. A large number of suspects were arbitrarily shipped on board the fleet, where it was believed they helped by their infection to beget the mutiny at the Nore. Lord Moira, a patriot Irish n.o.bleman, protested vehemently in the House of Lords, but his exaggeration and partiality broke the force of his appeal. To control the excesses of repression and restore military discipline, the gallant Abercrombie was put in command; but he lost his self-control, reviled the troops in an imprudent manifesto, broke with the government, and left matters worse than they had been before.

In Ulster, fraternities of strong Protestants, which had existed informally since 1689, were now formally organized as Orange Lodges. They embodied an intensely sectarian feeling and committed their share of outrages, but they lent the government powerful aid.

Conspicuous among the ruthless agents of repression was the head of the Beresfords, whose riding-house at Dublin was a daily scene of torture.

Conspicuous also was Judkin Fitzgerald, the field of whose operations was Tipperary. Fitzgerald's apologists plead that his policy was successful.

It might be so, but the cause of public order does not gain in the end by outraging that law of natural justice on respect for which public order must ultimately depend. Fitzgerald, savagely flogging a man on whom he had found a note in the French language, which not knowing French himself he could not read, was presently a.s.sured by one who could read the note that it was perfectly harmless. He nevertheless continued the torture of the lash till the victim nearly expired. Such a case seems to defy apology.

Fitzgerald, however, was not only protected from question by an Act of Indemnity, but rewarded with a t.i.tle. On both sides all hearts were fired with the satanic madness of civil war.

French aid had been promised. To the unspeakable discredit of the British admiralty, it came. An expedition which had long been in preparation under Hoche was allowed to sail from Brest and unopposed to make the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay. A storm which prevented a landing, the bad seamanship of the French, whose naval service had been shattered by the revolution, and the separation of the frigate which had the general on board from the rest of the fleet, saved Ireland from temporary conquest and Great Britain from the consequences of that disaster. It is remarkable that the peasantry in the neighbourhood of Bantry Bay received the soldiers of the government well and shared their potatoes with them. Was this loyalty or fear? Had the French landed, would the potatoes have been still more hospitably shared? An expedition afterwards fitted out in Holland, now a va.s.sal of France, at the very crisis of the mutiny at the Nore, was weatherbound till the mutiny was over and was then crushed by Duncan at Camperdown. A small French force under Humbert afterwards landed, and at Castlebar put the militia to shameful flight. But it was presently surrounded by superior numbers and forced to surrender. There were still some faint demonstrations, in one of which the arch-enemy of England, Wolfe Tone, met his doom. He imprudently betrayed his ident.i.ty to his captors. His French commission availed him not. He escaped the gallows by suicide. He was a genuine enthusiast, and he was at all events on one of the only two practicable lines of action. Separation was the sole alternative to union. But had Tone got the upper hand, with his fanaticism and a savage peasantry thirsting for Protestant and English blood at his back, the political millennium in Ireland, as in France, would have opened with a reign of terror.

Disappointed of aid from France, the rebellion took the field by itself.

There was a great rising in Wexford, headed by Father Murphy, a fighting priest, a compound of Wat Tyler and John Ball, who gave himself out as a supernatural personage, and persuaded the people that he could catch bullets in his hands. The father showed a natural genius for war. His peasants fought desperately, and the Irish pike proved a formidable weapon in their hands. The rebels gained one or two successes in the field, and took the city of Wexford. They perpetrated fiendish cruelties. At Scullabogue they burned or butchered a barn full of Protestants. At Wexford they dragged their prisoners to the bridge, stripped them naked, hoisted them up on the points of their pikes, and threw them into the river. At Vinegar Hill, a name of ghastly memory, the rebel headquarters, a batch of Protestants was every day brought out after a mock trial to be ma.s.sacred. The people being here under priestly leadership, the character of a religious crusade was given to their warfare, and every Protestant was a mark for their murderous fury. On the other hand, Protestants in the north who at the outset had been revolutionary, seeing the rebellion a.s.sume the character of a Catholic crusade, pa.s.sed to the side of government and repression. One or two men of property were forced into leadership by the rebels; otherwise property was entirely on the side of the government.

After Scullabogue, Wexford, and Vinegar Hill, there could not fail to be a terrible outpouring of vengeance. It came in full measure, as we learn from the correspondence of Cornwallis, a soldier of high distinction and character, who was sent in place of Camden as viceroy to close the scene.

He is much afraid, he says, that any man in a brown coat who is found within several miles of the field of action is butchered without discrimination. The Irish militia, he says, are totally without discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches either with or without arms come within their power. In short, murder appears their favourite pastime. The conversation of the princ.i.p.al persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood, and the conversation even at his own table, where he does all he can to prevent it, always turns on shooting, burning, hanging. If a priest has been put to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. "Who fears to speak of '98?" said a patriot bard in other days. The answer is, every one who is not utterly lost to reason and humanity. These militia men, it is to be borne in mind, were Irish, not English, and their murderous enmity was the enmity of one section of Ireland to another.

XII

Pitt now resolved on a legislative union of Ireland with England and Scotland, thus reverting to the policy of the Commonwealth. But union had been the ideal of Molyneux, and since the revolution of 1782 it had found many advocates, among them Adam Smith. An Irish government of sectarian ascendancy and oligarchy combined, controlled, and held in precarious subordination to the government of Great Britain by intrigue and corruption, had ended in murderous and ruinous conflict of political parties, social cla.s.ses, and religious sects. In its realm people had been refusing to eat pork because the swine might have fed on human flesh.

Foreign invasion had been invited. It had come, and only by repeated miracles had Great Britain as well as Ireland been saved in the last extremity of peril. Nor had that peril ceased. It was much to be deplored that Pitt could not, like Cromwell and the Council of State, effect the union by simply calling representatives of Ireland to the Parliament at Westminster. Situated as Pitt was, he had, as Castlereagh laconically put it, "to buy the fee simple of Irish corruption." The price he paid was compensation in money to the owners of pocket boroughs and profuse grants of peerages. The process was not edifying. Cornwallis, who had come at once to put an end to havoc and to carry the union, having a strict sense of honour, might well recoil from his task. Bribery with money has not been brought home to the government, though in one case at least it has been brought home to the opposition. From that stain the union is free. A pretty large sum was needed to tune the press and for campaign expenses.

Pocket boroughs in those days were deemed property, and had been so treated in Pitt's Reform Bill for England. The compensation paid the owners of boroughs was not above the market price, and it was paid to the opponents as well as to the supporters of the union; Lord Downshire, the most powerful opponent of the union, as it happened, receiving the largest sum of all. Foster, who made the greatest speech in Parliament against the union, received seventy-five hundred pounds for his half share of a pocket borough. In the absence of such compensation the owners of pocket boroughs and the purchasers of seats for them would have been virtually bribed by their private interest apart from any political consideration to oppose the bill. Something was needed to induce a powerful and selfish oligarchy to part with the field of its ascendancy and its ambition. For that purpose the lavish creation of peerages was used. It cost the nation nothing, and t.i.tles which had been openly used as bribes were not capable of much degradation. Pitt is upbraided for not having taken the sense of the nation by means of a general election. The sense of a nation of which at least three-quarters were not eligible to Parliament! The sense of the proprietors of nomination boroughs on the question of depriving them of their property and its influence! The sense of a nation, the pa.s.sions of which had not had time to cool after a furious civil war, a civil war the ashes of which still fiercely glowed and might by the excitement of a general election have been fanned again into a flame! It is ever to be lamented that the thing could not have been done in a simpler and less questionable way. But it had to be done. Venality was venal, and, its consent being necessary to the salvation of the state, had to be bought.

The purity of Pitt's motives or of those of his colleagues cannot be questioned. The idea that he had provoked rebellion to make way for union is a slander which only political frenzy could fabricate or believe.

What was the feeling in Ireland at large it is very hard to determine.

There were addresses and declarations on both sides, but we cannot tell how they were got up. Cornwallis made a canva.s.sing tour. His opinion at first was that Dublin was furiously opposed but the rest of the country was favourable. This estimate changed as the struggle went on. Dublin, of course, was the centre of excitement. At the outset it was the scene of a riot. The capital could not like to lose the seat of government and the social centre; nor could the Irish bar like the transfer of the supreme jurisdiction to Westminster, or the severance of the Parliamentary from the forensic career; the two, while Parliament sat in Dublin, having been habitually, and often brilliantly, combined. Cork, on the other hand, was flattered with the prospect of becoming a second Glasgow. It seems strange that the Orangemen should then have been against the union, of which they have since been the staunchest supporters. But they no doubt scented the approach, with the union, of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. The Catholic hierarchy, headed by Archbishop Troy, was strongly for the union, and unquestionably drew with it a large following both of clergy and laity.

The hope was undoubtedly held out of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation, possibly accompanied by a provision for the Catholic priesthood, as a sequel to the union; though no positive pledge was or could be given. At the same time it is to be borne in mind that the general sympathy of a Catholic priesthood would be with the British government as the chief antagonist of an atheist France. The terrible tension of '98 had probably been followed in many quarters by collapse and readiness to acquiesce in anything that could hold out to life and property the protection of a strong government.

The "Annual Register" for 1802 says that at the first election of Irish members to the United Parliament no supporter of the union lost his election or was even upbraided on that account; that in the county of Dublin alone did a candidate think his opposition to the union such a claim to popular favour as to make it worth his while to allude to it; and that some of the largest and most independent counties returned strong supporters of the union. Cornwallis reports that in Dublin, the chief centre of opposition, when at last the royal a.s.sent was given to the bill, not a murmur was heard nor, as he believed, was there any expression of ill-humour throughout the whole city.

The Established Church of Ireland would be willing to support a measure which, by identifying it with the English establishment, converted it from the Church of a small minority into a limb of the Church of a great majority, thus giving it a tenable ground of existence and a pledge of support which it fondly hoped would never fail.

The campaign of opinion, at all events, was conducted on both sides with perfect freedom. There is no pretence for alleging that the union was carried by military force. The affair at Dublin was a street riot, for the repression of which it was necessary to call in the troops. Nothing like military terrorism in fact is alleged. Twelve months before the pa.s.sing of the union, and in the middle of the struggle, Cornwallis said that "the force remaining in Ireland was sufficient to maintain peace, totally inadequate to repel foreign invasion."

There were historic debates in the Irish Parliament. Grand speeches were made in the nationalist and patriotic vein by opponents of the union.

Grattan, the author of the const.i.tution of 1782, came in his volunteer uniform to bedew its hea.r.s.e with his oratoric tears. The dramatic effect was enhanced by the bodily infirmity of the great patriot and orator, which obliged him to speak sitting. Plunket put forth to the utmost those powers of debate which led Lord Russell to p.r.o.nounce him of all the many speakers whom he had heard the most convincing. Foster produced a profound effect by his mastery of commercial and financial detail, though in this part of the field he had to contend with the supreme and unclouded judgment of Adam Smith left on record in favour of union. As strong an argument as any was that Ireland would be in danger of losing her leading men, who would be drawn away to England. But absenteeism was already rife, and was likely to be in the main diminished rather than increased by any measure which made Ireland a happier abode. To the spirit of nationality telling appeals could not fail to be made; but to what the nationality amounted, whether it was nominal or real, of the heart or merely of local boundary, had with terrible clearness appeared. In the speeches of the opposition there seems to have been much more of political argument of a general kind and of patriotic sentiment than of reference to the actual working of the Const.i.tution of 1782 and the consequences to which it had led.

Of all the opponents of the union on the high patriotic ground, the most fervid was Plunket. "For my own part," he exclaimed, "I will resist it to the last gasp of my existence, and with the last drop of my blood, and when I feel the hour of my dissolution approaching I will, like the father of Hannibal, take my children to the altar and swear them to eternal hostility against the invaders of their country's freedom." It is to be hoped that Plunket's children, if they took the oath, found absolution; for the father soon afterwards, sitting in the united Parliament of which he was a distinguished member, had so far changed his sentiments as to say of the union; "As an Irishman I opposed that union; as an Irishman I avow that I did so openly and boldly, nor am I now ashamed of what I then did.

But though in my resistance to it I had been prepared to go the length of any man, I am now equally prepared to do all in my power to render it close and indissoluble. One of the apprehensions on which my opposition was founded, I am happy to say, has been disappointed by the event. I had been afraid that the interest of Ireland, on the abolition of her separate legislature, would come to be discussed in a hostile Parliament. But I can now state--and I wish when I speak that I could be heard by the whole of Ireland--that during the time that I have sat in the united Parliament I have found every question that related to the interests or security of that country entertained with indulgence and treated with the most deliberate regard."

Grattan too sat in the united Parliament enjoying a Nestorian dignity and at first, Parliamentary reformer though he was, for a nomination borough.

He voted for one of those measures of coercion, the necessity for which unhappily soon made itself felt. The most telling speech of all against union in the Irish Parliament was that of Foster; and Foster too sat in the united Parliament, was reconciled to Pitt, was by him made chancellor of the Irish exchequer, and became a peer of the United Kingdom.

The cause of the union in debate was pleaded by Clare and Castlereagh, inferior to their opponents in eloquence, though Clare was a very formidable speaker as well as a very strong man.

Through the British Parliament the union was carried by overwhelming majorities, though opposed by Grey, who afterwards, as prime minister, became its firm upholder, and by Sheridan, far less sage than brilliant, while Fox refused to attend the debates, throwing out a hint that he preferred something in the way of federation; what, he did not say. In the Irish Parliament at first the measure was defeated. It was carried at length by dead-lift effort on the part of Clare and Castlereagh, who, leading for the government, did unquestionably make unlimited and by no means scrupulous use of such expedients as in those days were more freely employed by governments to push vital measures through the House. That such expedients should have prevailed is to be deplored as a stain on the origin of the union. At the same time it proves the rottenness of the a.s.sembly then on trial for its life. Nor should it be forgotten that on the side of opposition to the union were arrayed purely local and personal interests not more respectable in themselves than were the methods by which their resistance was overcome.

Let Irish patriots, when they bewail the extinction of the independent Parliament of Ireland, remember that its last days had been marked by eager support of the most ruthless and sanguinary measures of repression.

No serious exception appears to have been taken to the political bargain which gave Ireland one hundred representatives in the House of Commons and thirty-two representatives, including four bishops sitting by rotation, in the House of Lords. The party system has never been const.i.tutionally recognized, and it was not observed that the representative peers, elected by their own order, would always be Tory, to the total exclusion of the other party. About the fiscal bargain questions are raised. These affect not the political issue.