ment undoubtedly was, it is extremely questionable whether the Union could have been carried had there been a dissolution.

It must be added, too, that the corruption of the House of Commons was not so great as to prevent it on important occasions from yielding to the wishes of the people. The Irish House of Lords was a perfectly subservient body; the Irish House of Commons never was. In the early part of the eighteenth century the refractory element in it was chiefly due to the extreme dislike of the Irish landlords to tithes, while the English interest was for a long space of time directed by the primates of the Church. Archbishop Boulter complains bitterly of the opposition he had on this ground to encounter, and of the hostility of the Parliament to the Church.1 At a later period the Octennial Bill was forced by public opinion on a very reluctant Parliament, and Parliament fully reflected the national enthusiasm in 1782. In Ireland, as in England, a certain proportion of the borough-owners were patriotic, and several of them came forward prominently in support of the Reform Bill of Flood. The most tyrannical acts of the Irish Parliament may be fully matched by some of the proceedings of the English Parliaments under the Tudors, and though very corrupt if compared with the British Parliament at the end of the last century, and of course still more with that of our own day, it was probably not much more corrupt, and was certainly much more tolerant, than that which sat in London in the early years of the eighteenth century. No one has stigmatised the Irish Legislature in more vehement language than Lord Macaulay, but he could hardly apply to it stronger terms of condemnation than he applied to the English See Boulter's Letters, ii. 154, 217, 234-236. 2 Grattan's Life, iii. 123.

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Parliament of Walpole, who governed by corruption, because in his time it was impossible to govern otherwise.' 'A large proportion of the members,' he tells us, had absolutely no motive to support any administration except their own interest, in the lowest sense of the word. Under these circumstances the country could be governed only by corruption. . . . We might as well accuse the poor Lowland farmers who paid blackmail to Rob Roy of corrupting the virtue of the Highlanders, as accuse Sir R. Walpole of corrupting the virtue of Parliament!'

In estimating the character of a legislature, we should consider the period of its existence, the difficulties with which it had to contend, and the temptations to which it was exposed; and if these things be taken into account, the Irish Parliament will not be wholly condemned. Malone and Hutchinson, Flood and Grattan, Curran, Plunket, Foster, Parsons, Forbes, and Burrowes were men who would have done honour to any Parliament. That a Legislature so defective in its constitution should have continued to exist is indeed wonderful, but it is far more wonderful that it should have achieved what it did, that it should have asserted its own independence, that it should have riven the chains that fettered its trade, that it should have removed the most serious disabilities under which the mass of the people laboured, that it should have voluntarily given up the monopoly of power it possessed, as representing the Protestants alone. With every inducement to religious bigotry, it carried in its latter days the policy of toleration in many respects farther than the Parliament of England. With many inducements to disloyalty, it was steadily faithful to the connection. And its reputation has suffered by its fidelity, for the invectives of the United Irishman Wolfe Tone have been reproduced by

VOL. I.

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English writers as if they were the most impartial description of its merits.'

'I argue not,' said Grattan, 'like the minister, from the misconduct of one Parliament against the being of Parliament itself. I value that parliamentary constitution by the average of its benefits, and I affirm that the blessings procured by the Irish Parliament in the last twenty years are greater than the blessings afforded by British Parliaments to Ireland for the last century, greater even than the mischiefs inflicted on Ireland by British Parliaments, greater than all the blessings procured by these Parliaments for their own country within that period. Within that time the Legislature of England lost an empire, and the Legislature of Ireland recovered a constitution.'

Nor should it be omitted that the Irish Parliament was on the whole a vigilant and intelligent guardian of the material interests of the country. During the greater part of the century, indeed, it had little power except that of protesting against laws crushing Irish commerce; but what little it could do it appears to have done. Its Journals' show a minute attention to industrial questions, to the improvement of means of communication, to the execution of public works. One of the most important events in English industrial history in the eighteenth century was the creation of a system of inland navigation by means of canals with locks, an improvement which is due to the genius of the engineer Brindley, and to the enterprise of the Duke of Bridgewater. The first canal in England of any magnitude was that between Worsley and Manchester, which was opened in 1761. The Irish Parliament appears

1 Thus, e.g., Macaulay, in his very fine speech 'on the state of Ireland,' having poured a multitude of fierce epithets on the Irish Parliament, con. cluded: 'I do not think that by saying this I have given offence to any gentleman from Ireland, however zealous for repeal he may be, for I only repeat the language of Wolfe Tone.'

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to have immediately perceived its importance, and it undertook with great energy and alacrity to provide Ireland with a complete system of internal navigation. In 1761 it voted a sum of 13,500l. to the corporations of several inland navigations, and made special grants for a canal from Dublin to the Shannon, and for improving the navigation of the Shannon, Barrow, and Boyne. Two years later works of the most extensive kind appear to have been undertaken. Among the votes of the Irish House of Commons in 1763, we find grants for the construction of a canal between Dublin and the Shannon; for a canal from Newry to Lough Neagh; for a canal connecting Lough Swilly with Lough Foyle; for a canal which, together with improvements on the river Lagan, was intended to complete the navigation between Lough Neagh and the sea at Belfast; and for four other inland navigations by canals.1

There was no doubt much jobbing in public works and in other ways, but the taxation of Ireland was kept very low; there was little or no unfair pressure upon the poorer classes; the National Debt up to the time of the great French war was very moderate, and in the last years of the Irish Parliament, or at all events from the concession of free trade in 1779 to the rebellion of 1798, the material progress of Ireland was rapid and, except by one or two years of bad harvest, uninterrupted. In ten years from 1782 the exports trebled. Lord Sheffield, who wrote upon Irish commerce in 1785, said, 'At present, perhaps, the improvement of Ireland is as rapid as any country ever experienced;' and Lord Clare, in his great speech in 1798, made a similar assertion with much greater emphasis. Speaking of the period that had elapsed since 1782, he said, 'There is not a nation in the habitable globe

Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 349-383.

2 See Grattan's Speech, May 18, 1810, vol. iv. p. 207.

which has advanced in cultivation and commerce, in agriculture and manufactures, with the same rapidity in the same period.'

When the Union was passed, Grattan for a time retired from politics. His health had been for some time unsatisfactory, and his spirits were greatly depressed by a defeat which he regarded as the destruction of the liberties of his country. He saw in it the overthrow of the entire labour of his life. For some time he could not bear to hear it discussed in conversation, and his eyes often filled with tears when speaking of it. But the people, who had been paralysed by the late rebellion, remained in a state of stupefied and sullen quiescence. Emmet's rebellion, which took place in 1803, cannot be regarded as in any degree the consequence of the Union. It was but the last wave of the rebellion of 1798, and originated in the overheated brain of an amiable and gifted, but most unpractical enthusiast. One great cause, however, still remained, and to the service of Catholics Grattan resolved to devote his remaining years.

He entered the British Parliament in 1805, and took his seat modestly on one of the back benches; but Fox, exclaiming, 'This is no place for the Irish Demosthenes!' drew him forward, and placed him near himself. Great doubts were felt about his success. The difference of the tone and habits of the two Parliaments, the advanced age of Grattan, the recent failure of Flood, and the cause Grattan had assigned for that failure,1 suggested weighty reasons for fear. Much anxiety, therefore, and much curiosity, were felt when he rose to speak on that memorable night when the Catholic question was reopened. For a moment, it is said, the strangeness of

'He was an oak of the forest too old and too great to be transplanted at fifty.'