EFFECTS OF THE ACT OF 1793

147

would be changed, when the power of religion would be opposed to territorial interest, and when the small farmers would become a weapon of overwhelming power in the hands of their priests. Already something of the kind was shown in the election of delegates for the Catholic Convention.

That this prediction was fully verified is well known. For about a generation, however, the control of the landlords over their Catholic tenants was unbroken, and it had an economical effect of the worst kind. It is an exaggeration to attribute wholly, or even mainly, to this measure the extreme subdivision of farms which became one of the master evils of Irish life, and which rendered the great famine of 1846 so terrible. Powerful economical causes were tending in this direction, but there is no doubt that the Relief Act of 1793 seriously aggravated the evil. In all political contests the power and consequence of a landlord depended chiefly on the number of the votes he could command; and he had therefore a strong motive to encourage, or at least to acquiesce in, the constant subdivision of farms.

And while the Act gave equality of privilege to the most ignorant and incapable Catholics, it withheld equality from the most intelligent, the most loyal, the most important. The Catholic peasant could vote like his Protestant neighbours, but the Catholic gentleman was still marked out from the Protestants of his own class by a degrading disability. He could, it is true, now become a Grand Juror and a magistrate, but he could not sit in either House of Parliament. No class of men had shown themselves in the past more indisputably loyal than the Catholic gentry, and an educated class naturally feels political disqualifications and inequalities far more keenly than an ignorant peasantry. By maintaining an irritating disability the Catholic question was left manifestly unsettled, and after all that had been

given, it was quite certain that the exclusion could not permanently be maintained. Looking at the immediate future, if the object of statesmen was to meet a serious crisis by settling a great question and allaying a most dangerous agitation, it would be difficult to conceive a graver want of statesmanship than not to have at this time completed the settlement. Looking at the distant future, the case became, if possible, even stronger. One of the worst effects of the penal laws had been that it reduced to a very small proportion the Catholic landlords of Ireland, thus making the division of property coincident with the division of creed: a landlord class, mainly Protestant, ruling over a tenantry who in three provinces were nearly wholly Catholic. But if Catholic voters were now to be introduced in overwhelming numbers into the electorate, it was of the utmost importance that the small class of landlords of their own creed should retain all their power of guiding and influencing them, and of saving them from falling into unscrupulous hands. No class of men were likely in this respect to be so useful, and, as Burke truly said, 'to raise an aristocratic interest—that is, an interest of property and education-among them, and to strengthen by every prudent means the authority and influence of men of that description' was a matter of the highest policy. The exclusion of the Catholic gentry from their natural share in political power had a directly opposite effect. No measure could be more clearly injurious to their political influence over their co-religionists. Grattan solemnly and truly warned the Government that its tendency was to detach and divide the landed interest of the Catholics from the body at large,' and in this way to destroy the subordination of the common people and to set population adrift from the influence of property.'

All this was clearly seen in the Irish Parliament, and the alarmed letters of the Government show that the

OPENING OF TRINITY COLLEGE

149

feeling in favour both of complete Catholic Emancipation and of a reasonable reform was much stronger than they had expected. Ponsonby, who in 1792 had declared that the Catholics were not yet ripe for political power, now declared that, as the suffrage was conceded to them on the widest terms, it was pure folly to maintain the disabilities of the Catholic gentry. The Duke of Leinster, Lord Abercorn, and Mr. Conolly supported him, and Grattan threw all his powers on the same side. There is no reason to doubt that if the Government had wished at this time to complete the measure they could have done so. But the Irish Government would willingly have withheld everything, and Pitt had no wish to enter into a new controversy with them. The future Duke of Wellington was put up as the representative of the Government, and, viewed in the light of the future, his speech is very characteristic. He had no objection to giving Roman Catholics the benefits of the Constitution, and in his opinion the Bill conferred them in an ample degree. . . . With the Bill as it stands the Protestants are satisfied and the Roman Catholics contented. Why then agitate a question which may disturb both?'

In other respects the Act no doubt did much, and it was received with real satisfaction and gratitude by the Catholic leaders. The provision opening to them the degrees, though not the dignities and emoluments, of Dublin University proved especially acceptable. Catholics had for some time been admitted to its classes, and by connivance some of them appear even to have held scholarships without being obliged to conform to the Established faith.' The measure of 1793 opening its degrees carried out the policy which had been strongly advocated by its Provost Hely Hutchinson, and it was warmly supported by the heads of the University. For some seventy years of the nineteenth

1 1 Stubbs's History of the University of Dublin, pp. 238, 244.

century the Catholic laity freely availed themselves of it, and with the exception of O'Connell it would be difficult to name any of distinction springing from their gentry or middle classes who had not been educated in its walls. Moore, Sheil, and nearly all the Catholic judges of that period were educated there. Hutchinson desired that a Roman Catholic Divinity school should be established in the University, and that the priesthood should not be educated wholly apart from their Protestant fellowcountrymen, and Grattan shared his view; but it was not acceptable to the Catholic episcopacy. It is, however, a curious fact that one graduate of Dublin UniversityMichael Slattery-became President of Maynooth, and afterwards Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashel. No serious opposition to the education of Catholic laymen in the University was raised by their Church till the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the growth of Ultramontanism, and the immense increase of sacerdotal power in Ireland, which was the consequence of English democratic legislation, made it one of the great objects of the priesthood to obtain the same complete control over the higher as they already possessed over the primary education of their co-religionists.

Grattan and Ponsonby always maintained that if the Constitution of Ireland was to be made really representative, and the dangers of revolution averted, it was necessary to carry a reform of Parliament on the lines I have already indicated, abolishing the system under which more than two-thirds of the House of Commons consisted of men who were practically nominated. Sir Lawrence Parsons, in the speech to which I have referred, maintained that the Catholic question and the reform question should be indissolubly connected, and that the concession of political power to the Catholics ought to be made a part of a Reform

VIEWS OF THE UNITED IRISHMEN 151

Bill. He desired that they should be fully admitted to Parliament, but that they should be only admitted to the electorate on a twenty-pound franchise. A measure of this kind would have given the Irish Constitution an immense accession of real strength, though Burke reminded the House that if the growing agitation was to be effectually met they must also deal speedily with the tithe system, which was the chief practical grievance of the poor. But neither the Irish Government nor the English Government had any wish to carry a Reform Bill. They did not desire that the Irish Parliament should be a really independent body; they probably did not desire that it should be a permanent one, and under the existing Constitution they possessed a power which could not easily be broken.

The United Irishmen, whose influence was growing in the country, already included some men who hated England and her Government; but the object of the majority was simply parliamentary reform, and they cared for the Catholic question chiefly as a means of obtaining that reform or as being a necessary part of it. The Catholic Relief Act of 1793 was therefore quite incapable of conciliating them. The process by which the more moderate members of the society were turned into rebels is well shown in the clear and evidently truthful memoir on the rise and aims of the United Irishmen, which was drawn up by their three leaders, O'Connor, Emmet, and Macnevin, when State prisoners. The society, they tell us, was at first simply and frankly loyal, aiming solely at parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation, and valuing the latter chiefly as a condition or an element of the former. But, even in 1791, 'it was clearly perceived that the chief support of the borough influence in Ireland was the weight of English influence.' About 1795 the persistent and

1

' Castlereagh Correspondence, i. 353-372.