However this may be, it

on the question of reform. cannot be said that in either country Flood's later years added to his reputation. He introduced in 1784 the Reform Bill of the preceding year into the Irish Parliament. The Volunteer Convention was no longer sitting, and addresses from all over the country poured in in favour of the Bill. Flood seems to have introduced it with great eloquence and also with great moderation, contending, however, that it was contrary to every principle of right and justice that individuals should be permitted to send into the House two, four, or six members, and to make a traffic of venal boroughs as if they were household utensils.' The Bill was not thrown out as in the previous year in its first stage. It was debated at great length and with much ability, and few of the debates in the Irish House are more instructive to a student of Irish parliamentary history, but at last, between three and four on a Sunday morning, the House by a majority of seventy-four refused to commit it. It found eighty-five supporters.

Flood did not after this event intervene frequently in Irish debates, but his occasional appearances were almost uniformly in hostility to the Government. He took a considerable part in the movement for protective duties on Irish industries. It was a question which obtained considerable magnitude on account of a severe period of commercial depression in 1783 and 1784, but it was also very dangerous, as it was likely to lead to a war of tariffs with England and a revival of commercial jealousy between the two countries. He in the same spirit opposed Pitt's commercial propositions in 1785, not merely in the amended form in which they were ultimately defeated in Ireland, but even in their first form which was accepted by Grattan and most of his friends. From first to last he consistently contended that Irish trade could only flourish if largely

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supported by bounties and protective laws, and that the Irish Parliament should never relinquish or restrict its powers of imposing such laws. He again more than once dwelt upon his old subjects of the necessity of retrenchment, and especially of military retrenchment in Ireland; he spoke at great length and with much learning on a legal question of the rights of the Court of King's Bench which appeared to have been strained by an undue extension of the doctrine of contempt of Court; and he again urged the necessity for parliamentary reform. He never, however, appears to have modified his belief that the strictly Protestant character of the Irish Constitution in Church and State must be jealously maintained, and that no Catholic element should be admitted to power. A small number of able and independent men in the Irish Parliament always looked up to him as their leader, and on the Catholic question his views were substantially identical with those of John Foster, one of the ablest Irishmen of his day. But his position was becoming more and more isolated. The maintainers of the existing form of government regarded him as a violent, factious, and dangerous demagogue. The reformers believed that no Irish Reform was feasible or likely to be enduring which did not include the Catholics. After 1786 Flood appears to have no longer attended the Irish Parliament, though he still retained his seat. His name at least no longer appears in its debates.

In the British Parliament also his career was very disappointing. As far back as 1767 he had, through the instrumentality of Lord Charlemont, been engaged in a negotiation for a seat in that House, and he was at that time an ardent admirer of Lord Chatham. At the close of the Harcourt Administration, as we have already seen, he was anxious to enter the House under the auspices of Lord

North and prepared to support the American policy of that statesman. His election for Winchester in 1783 was a mere matter of purchase, for he had given 4,000l. for a seat which he only held for a single year.

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His failure in the British House is well known. His habits had been already formed for an Irish audience, and, as Grattan said of him, he was an oak of the forest too great and too old to be transplanted at fifty.' He was also guilty of extraordinary imprudence. He began by proclaiming openly that he would not identify himself with either of the great parties in Parliament. It was a foolish but also a characteristic step, for he had of late years shown an ever-increasing tendency to play an isolated part. In Ireland this had done much to deprive him of the confidence of all parties, and in England he prejudiced both sides of the House against him, and deprived himself of the support which is of such great consequence to a debater. He spoke first on the India Bill, which ultimately led to the downfall of the Coalition Ministry. He had but just arrived in London, and the subject as he himself acknowledged was one on which he knew very little, but he rose, as a practised speaker often does, in a Parliament with which he is familiar to make a few remarks in a conversational tone, to detect some flaw in a preceding speaker's argument, or to throw light upon some particular section of the subject, without intending to make an elaborate speech, or to review the entire question. Immediately from the lobbies and the coffee-room the members came crowding in, anxious to hear a new speaker of whom great expectations were entertained. He seems to have thought that it would be disrespectful to those members to sit down at once, so he continued extempore, and soon showed his little knowledge of the subject. When he concluded there was a universal feeling of disappointment. A

THE COMMERCIAL TREATY WITH FRANCE 85

member named Courtenay rose, and completed his discomfiture by a virulent and satirical attack, which the rules of the House prevented him from answering. It is hardly necessary to say that Courtenay was an Irishman. He confessed afterwards to Lord Byron that he had been actuated by a personal motive.1

A few days after his first speech Flood took an occasion of entering into an elaborate eulogy of the Irish volunteers, and deprecating the sending of any greater number of English soldiers to Ireland, and he moved a reduction of the army estimates. In the new Parliament of 1784, after a bitter quarrel with the Duke of Chandos, he was compelled to relinquish his seat for Winchester to a connection of the duke, and as he would neither enrol himself as a follower of Pitt or of Fox he had some difficulty in finding another seat, but he was returned for Seaford on a petition in 1785. He does not, however, appear to have taken any part in the English debates till the commercial treaty with France, which was carried in 1787. He opposed that treaty in a long and elaborate speech, which is well reported and which gives a good idea of his style of speaking. It is undoubtedly the speech of a very able man, who brought to bear on his subject a wide range of historical knowledge, much skill and ingenuity of reasoning and much felicity of language; but it is pervaded throughout with the chief economical errors which it was the great work of Adam Smith to refute. No one

1 Wraxall, speaking of Flood's failure, says: The slow, measured, and sententious style of enunciation which characterised his eloquence, however calculated to excite admiration it might be in the senate of the sister kingdom, appeared to English ears cold, stiff, and deficient in some of the best recommendations to attention.' This passage is very curious, as showing how little the present popular conception of Irish eloquence prevailed in the last century. Phillips states (Recollections of Curran, p. 117) that Flood's health was at this time utterly broken, and he attributes it to the dissipation of his youth.

maintained more emphatically that England and France must always be natural enemies-that the benefit of one must necessarily be the disadvantage of the other that trade between two nations can never be mutually beneficial-that the old mercantile doctrine of the balance of trade should be the foundation of commercial policy-that the great object of a wise statesman should be to acquire for his country as many monopolies as possible, and that this is the real advantage to be derived from the acquisition of colonies. He was on stronger ground when he compared the commercial treaty with France with the abortive commercial treaty with Ireland, and urged that the English manufacturers who had looked with such jealousy on the first should be inexorably opposed to the second. 'If a commercial treaty with Ireland was thought to be so destructive to the trading interest of this country, what must it be with one that has five times her credit, eight times her population, and forty times her capital ? '

Wilberforce, in answering this speech, spoke warmly of its eloquence and power, and in a subsequent altercation with William Grenville, who had reproached him with the part he had taken in the rejection of the Irish commercial propositions in 1785, Flood seems to have brilliantly held his own; but his success on this occasion did not again soon tempt him into the arena. With the exception of a speech against an India Bill in 1788, he never appears to have spoken till March 1790, when he introduced a Reform Bill in a speech which was much and justly admired,' though it advocated a cause which in the existing state of English public opinion was absolutely hopeless.

His proposal was that one hundred members, chosen by county household suffrage, should be added to the

I have given an analysis of it in my Hist. of England, vi. 50-51 (Cabinet ed.).