In order to measure the space which had at this period been covered by the forward movement of liberality and patriotism, it is necessary to look back to the early years of the Georgian period, when Whiggism had acquired a decisive ascendency, and the spirits of the great deep were let loose against Popery. But the temper of proscription in the two countries exhibited specific differences. Extravagant in both, it became in Ireland vulgar and indecent. In England, it was Tilburina,[90] gone mad in white satin; in Ireland it was Tilburina's maid, gone mad in white linen. The Lords Justices of Ireland, in 1715, recommended the Parliament to put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland "but that of Protestant and Papist."[91] And the years that followed seem to mark the lowest point of constitutional depression for the Roman Catholic population in particular, as well as for Ireland at large. The Commons, in 1715, prayed for measures to discover any Papist enlisting in the King's service, in order that he might be expelled "and punished with the utmost severity of the law."[92] When an oath of abjuration had been imposed which prevented nearly all priests from registering, a Bill was passed by the Commons in 1719 for branding the letter P on the cheek of all priests, who were unregistered, with a red-hot iron. The Privy Council "disliked" this punishment, and substituted for it the loathsome measure by which safe guardians are secured for Eastern harems. The English Government could not stomach this beastly proposal; and, says Mr. Lecky,[93] unanimously restored the punishment of branding. The Bill was finally lost in Ireland, but only owing to a clause concerning leases. It had gone to England winged with a prayer from the Commons that it might be recommended "in the most effectual manner to his Majesty," and by the assurance of the Viceroy in reply that they might depend on his due regard to what was desired.[94] In the same year passed the Act which declared the title of the British Parliament to make laws for the government of Ireland. On the accession of George II., a considerable body of Roman Catholics offered an address of congratulation. It was received by the Lords Justices with silent contempt, and no one knows whether it ever reached its destination. Finally, the acute state-craft of Primate Boulter resisted habitually the creation of an "Irish interest," and above all any capacity of the Roman Catholics to contribute to its formation; and in the first year of George II. a clause was introduced in committee into a harmless Bill[95] for the regulation of elections, which disfranchised at a single stroke all the Roman Catholic voters in Ireland who up to that period had always enjoyed the franchise.

It is painful to record the fact that the remarkable progress gradually achieved was in no way due to British influence. For nearly forty years from the arrival of Archbishop Boulter in Ireland, the government of Ireland was in the hands of the Primates. The harshness of administration was gradually tempered, especially in the brief viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield; but the British policy was steadily opposed to the enlargement of Parliamentary privilege, or the creation of any Irish interest, however narrow its basis, while the political extinction of the mass of the people was complete. The pecuniary wants, however, of the Government, extending beyond the hereditary revenue, required a resort to the national purse. The demands which were accordingly made, and these alone, supplied the Parliament with a vantage-ground, and a principle of life. The action of this principle brought with it civilizing and humanizing influences, which had become clearly visible in the early years of George III., and which were cherished by the war of American Independence, as by a strong current of fresh air in a close and murky dungeon.

The force of principles, and the significance of political achievements, is to be estimated in no small degree by the slenderness of the means available to those who promote them. And the progress brought about in the Irish Parliament is among the most remarkable on record, because it was effected against the joint resistance of a hostile Executive and of an intolerable constitution. Of the three hundred members, about two-thirds were nominated by individual patrons and by close corporations. What was still worse, the action of the Executive was increasingly directed, as the pulse of the national life came to beat more vigorously, to the systematic corruption of the Parliament borough pensions and paid offices. In the latter part of the century, more than one-third of the members of Parliament were dismissible at pleasure from public emoluments. If the base influence of the Executive allied itself with the patriotic party, everything might be hoped. For we must bear in mind not only the direct influence of this expenditure on those who were in possession, but the enormous power of expectancy on those who were not. Conversely, when the Government were determined to do wrong, there were no means commonly available of forcing it to do right, in any matter that touched either religious bigotry or selfish interest. With so miserable an apparatus, and in the face of the ever-wakeful Executive sustained by British power, it is rather wonderful how much than how little was effected. I am not aware of a single case in which a measure on behalf of freedom was proposed by British agency, and rejected by the Irish Parliament. On the other hand, we have a long list of the achievements of that Parliament due to a courage and perseverance which faced and overcame a persistent English opposition. Among other exploits, it established periodical elections, obtained the writ of Habeas Corpus, carried the independence of the judges, repealed the Test Act, limited the abominable expenditure on pensions, subjected the acceptance of office from the crown to the condition of re-election, and achieved, doubtless with the powerful aid of the volunteers, freedom of trade with England, and the repeal of Poynings's Act, and of the British Act of 1719.[96]

All this it did without the manifestation, either within the walls or among the Roman Catholic population, of any disposition to weaken the ties which bound Ireland to the empire. All this it did; and what had the British Parliament been about during the same period, with its vastly greater means both of self-defence and of action? It had been building up the atrocious criminal code, tampering in the case of Wilkes with liberty of election, and tampering with many other liberties; driving, too, the American Colonies into rebellion, while, as to good legislation, the century is almost absolutely blank, until between 1782 and 1793 we have the establishment of Irish freedom, the economical reform of Mr. Burke, the financial reforms of Mr. Pitt, the new libel law of Mr. Fox, and the legislative constitution of Canada, in which both these great statesmen concurred.

But we have not yet reached the climax of Irish advancement. When, in 1782 and 1783, the legislative relations of the two countries were fundamentally rectified by the formal acknowledgment of Irish nationality, the beginning of a great work was accomplished; but its final consummation, though rendered practicable and even easy, depended wholly on the continuing good intention of the British Cabinet. The Acts of 1782 and 1783 required a supplemental arrangement, to obviate those secondary difficulties in the working of the two Legislatures, which supplied Mr. Pitt with his main parliamentary plea for the Union. What was yet more important was the completion of the scheme in Ireland itself. And this under three great heads: (1) The purification of Parliament by a large measure of reform; (2) the abolition of all Roman Catholic disabilities; (3) the establishment of a proper relation between the Legislative and the Executive powers. It is often urged, with cynical disregard to justice and reason, that with the Grattan Parliament we had corruption, coercion, discontent, and finally rebellion. But the political mischiefs, which disfigure the brief life of the Grattan Parliament, and the failure to obtain the two first of the three great purposes I have named, were all in the main due to the third grand flaw in the Irish case after 1782. I mean the false position, and usually mischievous character, of the Irish Executive, which, with its army of placemen and expectants in Parliament, was commonly absolute master of the situation. Well does Mr. Swift MacNeill,[97] in his very useful work, quote the words of Mr. Fox in 1797: "The advantages, which the form of a free Government seemed to promise, have been counteracted by the influence of the Executive Government, and of the British Cabinet."

There were five Viceroys between 1782 and 1790. Then came a sixth, Lord Westmoreland, the worst of them all, whose political judgment was on a par with his knowledge of the English language.[98] The great settlement of 1782-3 was in the main worked by men who were radically adverse to its spirit and intention. But they were omnipotent in their control of the unreformed. Parliament of Ireland, more and more drenched, under their unceasing and pestilent activity, with fresh doses of corruption. Westmoreland and his myrmidons actually persuaded Pitt, in 1792, that Irish Protestantism and its Parliament were unconquerably adverse to the admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise; but when the proposal was made from the Throne in 1793, notwithstanding the latent hostility of the Castle, the Parliament passed the Bill with little delay, and "without any serious opposition."[99] The votes against it were one and three on two divisions[100] respectively. A minority of sixty-nine supported, against the Government, a clause for extending the measure to seats in Parliament. That clause, lost by a majority of ninety-four, might apparently have been carried, but for "Dublin Castle," by an even larger majority.

I shall not here examine the interesting question, whether the mission of Lord Fitzwilliam was wholly due to the action of those Whig statesmen who were friendly to the war, but disinclined to a junction with Mr. Pitt except on condition of a fundamental change in the administration of Ireland. Nor shall I dwell upon his sudden, swift, and disastrous recall. But I purpose here to invite attention to the most remarkable fact in the whole history of the Irish Parliament. When the Viceroy's doom was known, when the return to the policy and party of ascendency lay darkly lowering in the immediate future, this diminutive and tainted Irish Parliament, with a chivalry rare even in the noblest histories, made what can hardly be called less than a bold attempt to arrest the policy of retrogression adopted by the Government in London. Lord Fitzwilliam was the declared friend of Roman Catholic Emancipation, which was certain to be followed by reform; and he had struck a death-blow at bigotry and monopoly in the person of their heads, Mr. Beresford and Mr. Cooke. The Bill of Emancipation was introduced on the 12th of February,[101] with only three dissentient voices. On the 14th, when the London Cabinet had declared dissent from the proceedings of their Viceroy without recalling him, Sir L. Parsons at once moved an address, imploring him to continue among them, and only postponed it at the friendly request of Mr. Ponsonby.[102] On the 2nd of March, when the recall was a fact, the House voted that Lord Fitzwilliam merited "the thanks of that House, and the confidence of the people."[103] On the 5th the Duke of Leinster moved, and the House of Peers carried, a similar resolution.[104]

At this epoch I pause. Here there opens a new and disastrous drama of disgrace to England and misery to Ireland. This is the point at which we may best learn the second and the greatest lesson taught by the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century. It is this, that, awful as is the force of bigotry, hidden under the mask of religion, but fighting for plunder and for power with all the advantages of possession, of prescription, and of extraneous support, there is a David that can kill this Goliath. That conquering force lies in the principle of nationality.

It was the growing sense of nationality that prompted the Irish Parliament to develop its earlier struggles for privilege on the narrow ground into a genuine contest for freedom, civil and religious, on a ground as broad as Ireland, nay, as humanity at large. If there be such things as contradictions in the world of politics, they are to be found in nationality on the one side, and bigotry of all kinds on the other, but especially religious bigotry, which is of all the most baneful. Whatever is given to the first of these two is lost to the second. I speak of a reasonable and reasoning, not of a blind and headstrong nationality; of a nationality which has regard to circumstances and to traditions, and which only requires that all relations, of incorporation or of independence, shall be adjusted to them according to the laws of Nature's own enactment. Such a nationality was the growth of the last century in Ireland. As each Irishman began to feel that he had a country, to which he belonged, and which belonged to him, he was, by a true process of nature, drawn more and more into brotherhood, and into the sense of brotherhood, with those who shared the allegiance and the property, the obligation and the heritage. And this idea of country, once well conceived, presents itself as a very large idea, and as a framework for most other ideas, so as to supply the basis of a common life. Hence it was that, on the coming of Lord Fitzwilliam, the whole generous emotion of the country leapt up with one consent, and went forth to meet him. Hence it was that religious bigotry was no longer an appreciable factor in the public life of Ireland. Hence it was that on his recall, and in order to induce acquiescence in his recall, it became necessary to divide again the host that had, welcomed him—to put one part of it in array as Orangemen, who were to be pampered and inflamed; and to quicken the self-consciousness of another and larger mass by repulsion and proscription, by stripping Roman Catholics of arms in the face of licence and of cruelty, and, finally, by clothing the extreme of lawlessness with the forms of law.

Within the last twelve months we have seen, in the streets of Belfast, the painful proof that the work of Beresford and of Castlereagh has been found capable for the moment of revival. To aggravate or sustain Irish disunion, religious bigotry has been again evoked in Ireland. If the curse be an old one, there is also an old cure, recorded in the grand pharmacopoeia of history; and if the abstract force of policy and prudence are insufficient for the work, we may yet find that the evil spirit will be effectually laid by the gentle influence of a living and working Irish nationality. Quod faxit Deus.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: 2 Henry VI., act iii. sc. 1.]

[Footnote 74: Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, chap, vii. vol. ii, p. 205.]

[Footnote 75: Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 227.]

[Footnote 76: Duffy's Bird's-Eye View, p. 164.]

[Footnote 77: Duffy's Bird's-Eye View, p. 166.]

[Footnote 78: See Ball's History of the Church of Ireland, a valuable work, deserving of more attention than it seems to have received.]

[Footnote 79: Boulter's Letters, i. 138, et alibi.]

[Footnote 80: Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, ii.]

[Footnote 81: Boulter's Letters, vol. ii.]

[Footnote 82: Cornwallis's Correspondence, ii. 441.]

[Footnote 83: Grattan's Life and Times, v. 173.]

[Footnote 84: Lecky, ii. 430.]

[Footnote 85: Duffy, p. 177.]

[Footnote 86: Schiller's Wallenstein.]

[Footnote 87: Lecky, iv. 489.]

[Footnote 88: Lecky, iv. 477-479; Brown, Laws against Catholics, pp. 329-332.]

[Footnote 89: Lecky, pp. 499-501.]

[Footnote 90: Sheridan's Critic, act iii. sc. I.]

[Footnote 91: Plowden's History (1809), ii. 70.]

[Footnote 92: Brown, Laws against Catholics, p. 289.]

[Footnote 93: Lecky, i. 297.]

[Footnote 94: Plowden, i. 297.]

[Footnote 95: 1 Geo. II. c. ix. sect 7.]

[Footnote 96: See Lecky, vi. 521.]

[Footnote 97: The Irish Parliament, p. 64. Cassell: 1885.]

[Footnote 98: See Lecky, vi. 492, 493.]

[Footnote 99: Lecky, vi. 567.]

[Footnote 100: Plowden's Historical Review, ii. 335.]

[Footnote 101: Ibid., ii. 353.]

[Footnote 102: Plowden's Historical Review, ii. 498.]

[Footnote 103: Ibid., ii. 357.]

[Footnote 104: Ibid., ii. 505.]



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