any measure of emancipation. He had always laid stress upon the inviolability of the Protestant Constitution of the United Kingdom. I consider,' he said in 1793, 'a repeal of the Act of Supremacy in any of the hereditary dominions of the Crown of Great Britain to be as much beyond the power of Parliament as a repeal of the Great Charter, or a repeal of the Bill of Rights. These views he urged with success upon the willing mind of George III.; and, as Mr. Lecky says, Clare deserves to be remembered in history as probably the first considerable statesman who maintained the doctrine that the King would violate his coronation oath, the Act of Settlement, and the Act of Union with Scotland, if he consented to a measure allowing the Catholic electors to send Catholic representatives into Parliament. Pitt, therefore, well knowing the King's settled convictions in regard to this matter, could not authorize Lord Cornwallis to do more than give general assurances of the friendly disposition of the Ministry with a view to conciliating Catholic support.

The policy of these conciliatory assurances, and the wisdom or justice of holding out hopes which Ministers could have no security of their own ability to fulfil, have been much discussed. Mr. Lecky considers that Pitt, when he found in 1800 that he could not venture to bring forward a dual measure of Parliamentary Union and Catholic Emancipation, should have deferred the introduction of the former until he should be in a position to offer the latter. This was Canning's advice. But Mr. Lecky also considers that, having resolved that a Protestant union should be pressed forward, it was essential that Catholic support should be secured for the measure by indirect promises in the way we have endeavoured to describe. We do not share this view. We think the promises were not needed. The difficulties which the authors of the Union had to face were mainly parliamentary, and were due almost altogether to the opposition of the borough-mongers. The Catholic leaders, however reluctant they might be to assent to a Union, without any guarantees of future concession, could not have ventured to oppose it actively. The country was cowed by the measures taken to suppress the Rebellion, and any violent resistance on the part of the people would only have furnished Clare and his friends with a new argument for the necessity of the measure.

The views expressed in the foregoing pages are those which, in general, we have long held concerning the most striking episodes in the history of the Grattan Parliament; and impressions derived, partly from the historical sources ordinarily accessible to the average student, and partly from independent investigation,

investigation, have been confirmed and strengthened by a careful perusal of the impartial pages of Mr. Lecky. Without agreeing with all the conclusions of the historian; believing, as was remarked at the beginning of this article, that he has rather understated than exaggerated the case for the Union, and that his deductions from his own premisses are less favourable to English policy than those premisses warrant, we yet consider that the account contained in the nine lengthy chapters, which the author has devoted to the story of the independent Parliament, will bear us out in the following reflections upon the lessons which are taught us by the history of that assembly.

The Grattan Parliament was, in the first place, a concession wrung from England in an hour of weakness, and acquiesced in by the English statesmen who assented to it, from that fainéant spirit that has so often fatally influenced English councils, and led to results ultimately most injurious to the interests of the country for whose welfare England is responsible. The revolt of the American colonies, and their successful assertion of independence, besides seriously crippling English resources, and rendering England's rulers doubly fearful of the danger of neglecting to conciliate Irish disaffection, gave a degree of plausibility to a policy of acquiescence in the demand which Flood and Grattan had long been urging. But it is plain that, at the time when the concession was made, the English politicians who granted it believed they were presenting Irish patriots with a mere toy. And had they maintained the basis upon which the Grattan Parliament was created, a toy that institution must ever have remained. The independence of the Irish Parliament was not at all the same thing as the independence of the Irish people, and was never intended to be so. The Parliament, to which was confided the liberties claimed in Grattan's Declaration, was a Parliament friendly to English ascendency. It was an assembly filled, as we have already pointed out, with the representatives of all the most stable classes in the island. It was impossible to imagine that a House of Commons, composed of country gentlemen, of the nominees of great noblemen, and of barristers aspiring to the bench by favour of the Government, would be an assembly levelling in its tendencies. In truth, no assembly more aristocratic in its sympathies, more Conservative in the ideas of the majority of its members, has ever existed than the Grattan Parliament as it was prior to 1793. Its general tendency, as shown by its attitude in respect to the Regency, was far more favourable to the power of the Crown and the preservation of the prerogative,

than

than that which characterized the contemporary English House of Commons. The acrimonious opposition offered by Grattan to Pitt's proposals in 1789 was due mainly to the circumstance, that the Irish statesman was in close alliance with Fox, and not to any solid or sincere objection to the proposition of the Government. Even the leaders of the patriotic party were known to be perfectly loyal to the English connection, and had no particular desire, at that time at all events, to foster extravagant claims. The heated debates which took place were often merely the struggles of parties fighting for place, and certainly possessed no international significance. The two sections in the Irish Parliament prior to 1793, however acute the personal differences which might separate them, were as cordial and unanimous in their attachment to the British Crown, as were English statesmen of all parties in their devotion to the maintenance of the Union prior to 1886. Questions involving the substitution of a Catholic for a Protestant ascendency, or tending to establish national independence in any Separatist sense, were as remote from the minds of such men as Lord Charlemont and the Duke of Leinster, as the Disestablishment of the Church of England is remote from the policy of Lord Salisbury. The only bone of contention, which caused any serious trouble, was the commercial question; and, in reference to the restrictions imposed upon Irish trade, the demand put forward was not for separate control of Customs, but simply for equal trade privileges with England.

The Grattan Parliament was therefore an assembly which, as originally constituted, might probably have been entrusted, with perfect safety, with a larger share of legislative initiative than in practice it possessed. But the peculiar relations, which subsisted between the Government and the House of Commons, provided, had they been necessary, additional safeguards and securities. The position, in which the Irish Parliament of 1782 stood as regards the Crown, really resembled more closely the relations that existed between the English Parliament and the Tudor Sovereigns, than the Constitutional arrangement that prevailed in England in the eighteenth century. The Chief Secretary, the most important member of the Government, though seated in the Lower House, was as little amenable to the Constitutional censure of Parliament as Cardinal Wolsey was to the Parliament of Henry VIII. His business was to submit to the House of Commons measures decided upon, not by Ministers representative of a majority of the House, but by the English Cabinet, after consultation with the LordLieutenant. So long as Government possessed a majority

in College Green, and prior to 1793 it did continuously possess such a majority, the decrees of Westminster or Downing Street were always certain to be registered in Dublin. Of course, successive Lords-Lieutenant strove to consult and conciliate Irish opinion, and the measures resolved on in London were naturally framed with a careful eye to the opinions entertained by Grattan and his followers. But the essential point is, that, whenever there was a divergence of view between the popular party and the Government, the latter could be secure of a triumph.

Not only was the legislative machinery worked from England, but the appointment of all the higher officials was in English hands. The Lord-Lieutenant and his Chief Secretary, then as now, were, of course, the nominees of the English Cabinet, the representatives of whatever English Party might chance to be in power. The Chancellor, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century and for long previously, was always an Englishman, until Clare was appointed; and his strong English sympathies had been well tried when he received the seals. The Bishops were appointed from England, and the Primate, who then took a not unimportant part in political affairs, was always a personage connected by close ties with England. The Castle officials were thoroughly English in feeling. The independence of the Parliament of 1782, hedged in, as we thus see it to have been, by all kinds of restrictions upon any national impulses which might have swayed it, consisted simply in its being constitutionally entitled to reject the policy recommended to its adoption by English statesmen. But, inasmuch as there never was a majority opposed to that policy, the independence of the Parliament, for all practical purposes, went for nought.

It may naturally be asked, however, if this estimate of the Grattan Parliament be correct, how was it enabled to gain that hold upon the affections of the people which, for a time, it undoubtedly possessed? Those only will require an answer to this question to whom the idiosyncrasies of Irish character are altogether unfamiliar. The Grattan Parliament easily appealed to the fanciful and picturesque notions of the Celtic race. Remote as it was in the character, creed, and even in the nationality, of those who sat in it, from what a truly Irish assembly would have been, it was still in the eyes of the people the native Parliament of Ireland. It possessed a nominal independence, sufficient to make it an object for the genuine Irish love of show, and of patriotic sentiment. Irishmen delight in spectacle and display; often they even seem to prefer

sham

sham to reality, the shadow to the substance. It was so with their native Parliament. The Irish people delighted in the fine sentiments that, clothed in the gorgeous rhetoric of Grattan, appealed to their most grandiose aspirations. They were proud, and justly, of the matchless exhibitions of eloquence which dignified the arena of debate. The populace of Dublin, which may be said to bear something of the same relation to the Irish people that the Parisian mob does to the French, revelled in the opportunities for demonstration which the annual opening of Parliament, or the progress of some great debate or party struggle, were sure to afford. Though there was at times little reality in these parliamentary displays, the orations which they produced, the magnificence of the eulogiums upon the spirit of Irish freedom which Grattan loved to pronounce, filled the people with the liveliest satisfaction. Some allowance, too, must be made, in accounting for the favour with which this assembly was regarded, for the material benefits that accrued to the metropolis, and in a measure to the country at large, from the existence of a Parliament in Dublin. The wealthy magnates, who sat in it, of necessity resided in the capital for a large part of the year. They were closely interested in the country and kept in contact with the people, and the commercial classes in Dublin, of course, profited largely by the residence within its boundaries of so many gentlemen of fortune. An aristocratic society was maintained in the capital, which to this day contains the evidences of the prosperity which the Grattan Parliament brought to it. The chief mansions in the city, now deserted by the descendants of their founders and converted into public offices, as well as almost all the best residential squares and streets, date from the time when the city was thronged with all the opulence of Ireland.

But while the Grattan Parliament as originally constituted was a body which could threaten little danger to imperial unity, while its sessions provided for the people a succession of attractive pageants, and numerous occasions for the effervescence of a not too noxious excitement, its character was liable to be totally changed as a result of the Relief Act of 1793. We should be sorry to be understood as arguing that the admission of Catholics to the franchise was necessarily a source of danger to the connection between Great Britain and Ireland. Many of the Catholic leaders were men of approved loyalty, and many of the advocates of Emancipation honestly believed that the moderate views of the leaders were fairly representative of those of the bulk of their followers. The admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise was dangerous,

not