since the Declaration of Independence, landlords in letting their farms constantly gave a preference to tenants who could support their interest at the hustings. Catholic leaseholders at the termination of their leases were continually ejected in order to make room for voters, or they were compelled to purchase the renewal of their leases on exorbitant terms.1

The Committee strongly protested against the notion that the property, respectability, and loyalty of the Catholics were on the side of Lord Kenmare and the seceders. All the great mercantile fortunes were with the Committee, and it was one of the results of the penal laws that the wealth of the Catholics was mainly mercantile. The property, they said, of those who signed the resolutions of the Committee certainly amounted to ten millions, and was probably more near to twenty millions. Even in landed property the party of the Committee claimed to possess the larger aggregate, though the aristocracy and the largest single estates were on the side of the seceders. They at the same time asserted their loyalty in the strongest terms, and they denied that any principle of sedition lurked among the Catholics in any corner of Ireland.

They took another step which marks the rapid growth of independence in the Catholic body. They issued a circular letter inviting the Catholics in every parish in Ireland to choose electors, who, in their turn, were in every county to choose delegates to the Catholic Committee in Dublin, in order to assist in procuring the elective franchise, and an equal participation in the benefits of trial by jury.' This step was evidently imitated from the Conventions of Dungannon, but nothing of the kind had ever appeared, or, indeed, been possible among the Irish Catholics since the era of the penal laws began. The Catholic prelates were much opposed to it,2 and its legality was at first questioned, but the opinions of two eminent counsel in its favour were obtained and circulated. It excited, however, the greatest alarm in the circle of the Government, and the grand juries in most of the counties of Ireland passed resolutions strongly censuring it. Some meetings of Protestant freeholders followed the example, and the Corporation of Dublin repudiated

218

Plowden, ii. (appendix) 209, 210,

2 Macnevin's Pieces of Irish History, p. 27; Tone's Memoirs, i. 65.

in the strongest terms the policy of their member Grattan, and declared that the Protestants of Ireland would not be compelled by any authority whatever to abandon that political situation which their forefathers won with their swords, and which is therefore their birthright.' They defined the Protestant ascendency which they pledged themselves to maintain as ‘a Protestant King of Ireland, a Protestant Parliament, a Protestant hierarchy, Protestant electors and Government, the benches of justice, the army and the revenue through all their branches and details Protestant; and this system supported by a connection with the Protestant realm of England.' 1

It is, I think, undoubtedly true, that a wave of genuine alarm and opposition to concession at this time passed over a great part of Protestant Ireland. The democratic character the Catholic question had assumed; the attempts of the northern Dissenters to unite with the Catholics on the principles of the French Revolution; the well-founded belief that some of the new Catholic leaders were in sympathy and correspondence with the democratic leaders; the incendiary newspapers and broadsides which were widely circulated, urging the Catholics to rest content with nothing short of the possession of the State; the outrages of the Defenders to which a more or less political significance was attached, and finally the great dread of innovation which the French Revolution had everywhere produced in the possessors of power, influenced many minds.2 At the same time the significance to be attached to the resolutions of the grand juries may be easily overrated. As I have already remarked, those bodies in the eighteenth century were very different from what they are in the present day. They were then constituted on the narrowest principles. They were notorious for their jobbing and for most of the vices that spring from monopoly,

Macnevin's Pieces of Irish His

tory, p. 29.

2 Thus Burke, writing in Sept. 1792, mentions that Grattan and Hutchinson had both been visiting him. They say that the ascendants are as hot as fire, and that they who think like them are in a manner obliged to decline all society.' Burke's Correspondence, iii. 530. Westmorland wrote to Pitt, Feb. 24, 1792:

'Grattan has completely ruined himself for some time, in the opinion of the House of Commons as well as all the Protestants of the country. We reap the benefit of his indiscretion, and if Mr. Grattan continues this theme, I almost flatter myself the support of English Government will become popular in the country." See, too, Gratian's Life, iv. 62.

and they had, therefore, every reason to dread any measure which would infuse into them a new and more popular element. They were also to a very unusual extent under the influence of a few great territorial families connected with the Government and susceptible to Government inspiration. The word had evidently gone forth from the Castle that this machine was to be set in motion against the Catholics. The grand jury of Limerick acted under the immediate influence of the Chancellor, and that of the county of Louth under the influence of the Speaker, and these appear to have chiefly led the movement. It must be added, too, that although at least fifteen grand juries joined in the protest, there were several which refused to do so; that in Mayo ten dissentient jurors protested against the resolution of the majority; and that while some of the grand juries accused the Catholics of endeavouring to overawe the Legislature and subvert the connection, and expressed themselves hostile to all concessions of political power, others contented themselves with describing the Convention as inexpedient, and breathed a spirit of marked conciliation towards the Catholics.

A few sentences from a paper drawn up by Richard Burke, towards the close of 1792, show his estimate of the movement. 'The Irish Government,' he says, 'gave me plainly to understand that they had come to an unalterable determination that the Catholics should not enjoy any share in the constitutional privileges, either now or at any future time.' They soon began 'to set up the Protestant against the Catholic interest, and to exasperate and provoke it by the revival of every sort of animosity, jealousy, and alarm. . . . Addresses were carried about by the known connections and dependants of the Castle from parish to parish, to obtain the signatures of the lowest of the people, and even marks of those who could not write. . . . The Irish Ministers endeavoured to inflame the Protestants against the Catholics, by an accusation which they knew to be false and believed to be impossible, viz. a supposed junction with factious persons of other descriptions, for the purpose of destroying the Church and State, and introducing a pure democracy. . . . Newspapers and publications paid for by, and written under the sanction of the Castle, were filled with the vilest scurrility

...

against their persons and characters. Every calumny which bigotry and civil war had engendered in former ages was studiously revived. . . . Every man, nearly in proportion to his connection with or dependence upon the Castle (and few of any other sort) expressed the most bitter, I may say bloody, animosities against the Catholics. This temper was nowhere discouraged. An address was procured from the Corporation of Dublin, absolute creatures of the Castle, the purport of which was to perpetuate the disfranchisement of the Catholics. It was carried up with the most ostentatious and offensive parade to the Castle (where an entertainment was prepared for the addressers), through the streets of Dublin, a city in which threefourths of the people are Catholics. . . . No ministerial member spoke during the whole session without throwing some aspersion either on the cause or on the persons. . . . None but ministerial persons, except Mr. Sheridan, showed any disrespect or virulence to the Catholics.'1

The debates on the question in Parliament extended to great length, and are exceedingly instructive. Several members urged with much force the absolute necessity to the well-being of the country, of gradually putting an end to the system according to which theological opinions formed the line of political division and the ground of political proscription. From the long period which had elapsed since the confiscations; from the extinction or expatriation of most of the descendants of the old proprietors; from the uniform loyalty shown by the Catholics during the past century, and from the great quantity of Catholic money which had been accumulated, and invested directly or indirectly in land, they inferred that it could be neither the wish nor the interest of the Catholics to shake the settled arrangements of property. They acknowledged that a new and democratic spirit had arisen in Ireland, and that very dangerous doctrines had been propounded among the Presbyterians of the North, but they contended that the Catholics were still untouched. The complete absence of political disaffection among them, which appears so strange, and at first sight so incredible, to those who are aware of the profound and virulent hostility to England which now animates the great body of their descendants, was 1 Burke's Correspondence, iv. 100–105.

again and again asserted. They had remained, it was said, perfectly passive during two Jacobite rebellions, and during five foreign wars, and Hely Hutchinson emphatically declared that, though he had been in the confidence of successive Irish Governments for no less than fifty years, he had never heard of any Catholic rising or intended rising of a political nature. In Ireland, as in all other countries, the Catholic gentry and priesthood looked with horror on the French Revolution, and nothing but a belief that political enfranchisement was only to be obtained by the assistance of the revolutionary party, was ever likely to throw a population of devout Catholics into its arms.

The Catholic question, however, was not, it was said, one that could be safely adjourned. Hitherto, the Presbyterian propagandism had been ineffectual, but who could tell how long it would continue so? England was now at peace, but she would probably soon be at war, and Ireland was likely to require all the energies of a united people to defend herself against invasion. A long-continued resistance would inevitably band the people into hostile camps, and revive those religious animosities which had formerly proved so calamitous. A habit of jealously scrutinising the relations of governors to the governed had since the French Revolution become the characteristic disposition of the time, and the American contest had established a doctrine about the connection between taxation and representation, which was glaringly inconsistent with the present position of the Catholics. If the question remained long unsettled, argued one member,2 with a remarkable prescience, it might some day to the infinite disadvantage of Ireland become an English party question, bandied to and fro according to English party interests. The extension of the franchise was the natural continuation of the policy of 1778 and 1782, and it was a policy which was amply justified by experience. It was the religious animosities, divisions, and incapacities that followed the Revolution that reduced the Irish Parliament to complete impotence, and rendered possible the destruction of Irish commerce. It was the subsidence of those animosities that led to the recovery of commercial freedom, and the acquisition of the Constitution of 1782. Without the co-operation of the two great sections of

1 Irish Parl. Deb. xiii. 256, 257.

2 Forbes.