One of the first acts of the first octennial parliament (the privy council had altered the proposed term of seven years into eight) was indicative of the altered tone of Irish parliamentary politics. In 1769 the Commons refused to proceed with a money bill, because it had not originated in their House.

Yet the people profited nothing by all this petitioning and agitating, and parliamentary assertion of privilege. The most tangible and indubitable effect of the Octennial Bill was that it enhanced the value of borough-property, by bringing the commodity oftener into the market. Distress went on, crime went on,* and political corruption and venality went on, in an ever-increasing ratio of celerity and extent. The government by Undertakers having been found, by recent experience, too troublesome of management and too uncertain of result to secure the progress of the King's business, or promote the convenience of the King's friends, a new system was determined on by the British cabinet, and one or two of them, when it appeared that he was extremely agitated. The company was alarmed.

"What's the matter?-Nothing, we hope, has happened, that

"Happened!' exclaimed their kind host, and swearing most piteously-Happened!— the Septennial Bill is returned!'

"A burst of joy from Lord Charlemont, and the very few real friends of the bill who happened to be present. The majority of the company, confused, and indeed almost astounded, began, after the first involuntary dejection of their features, to recollect that they had, session after session, openly voted for this bill, with many an internal curse, heaven knows! But still they had uniformly been its loudest advocates; and, therefore, it would be somewhat decorous not to appear too much cast down at their own unexpected triumph. In consequence of these politic reflections, they endeavoured to adjust their looks to the joyous occasion as well as they could. But they were soon spared the awkwardness of assumed felicity.

"The bill is not only returned,' continued their chieftain, but-but-the parliament is DISSOLVED!'

66

Hypocrisy far more disciplined than theirs, could lend its aid no further. If the first intelligence which they heard was tolerably doleful, this was complete discomfiture. They sank into taciturnity, and the leaders began to look in fact, what they had been so often politically called, a company of undertakers. They had assisted at the parliamentary funeral of some opponents; and now, like Charles V., though without his satiety of worldly vanities, they were to assist at their own. In the return of this fatal bill was their political existence completely inurned. Lord Charlemont took advantage of their silent mood, and quietly withdrew from this group of statesmen, than whom a more ridiculous, rueful set of personages in his life, he said, he never beheld. The city, in consequence of the intelligence of the evening, was in a tumult of gratitude and applause; illuminations were everywhere diffused, and our unintentionally victorious senators were obliged, on their return home, to stop at the end of almost every street, and huzza, very dismally, with a very merry, very patriotic, and very drunken populace."

*Much of the social condition of a country is to be gathered from its newspapers, especially from its newspaper advertisements. We have before us a copy of the Dublin Mercury of September 2, 1769, in which are six Dublin Castle "Proclamations by the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland," offering rewards for the discovery and conviction of criminals. The catalogue of crimes stands thus:

Unlawful combination and outrage by Dublin artificers;

Five cases of felonious maiming, cutting, stabbing, and houghing cattle, by tories, robbers, and rapparees of the Popish religion;

Two threatening letters;

One abduction;

One murder and robbery; and

One assault and murder.

Lord Townshend was the Viceroy (from 1767 to 1771) appointed to conduct it. The new system may be described in brief, as consisting in casting out devils by the prince of devils. The plan was, to break down the political monopoly of the aristocracy by throwing open the trade in bribes, places and pensions to a more general competition; abolishing all intervention of the Undertakers between the dispensers of patronage and its recipients; and bringing the resources of the Castle treasury to bear directly on every separate vote.

"The system in part succeeded," says Plowden," but by means ruinous to the country. The subalterns were not to be detached from their chiefs but by similar though more powerful means than those by which they had been enlisted under their banners. The streams of favour became not only multiplied, but enlarged; conse. quently, the source of remuneration was the sooner exhausted. Every individual now looked up directly to the fountain-head, and claimed and received more copious draughts."*

This new viceregal representative of the English interest in Ireland had great faith in the efficacy of well-directed bribery. Thus his lordship evinced his zeal for the Protestant cause, by raising the pension for conforming Catholic priests from 30l. to 407.; which the wits of the day called Townshend's Golden Drops. If the golden drops failed of their intended effect on the faith of the Catholic priesthood, the disappointment was more than compensated by the rapidity and vigour of their operation on Protestant parliamentary patriotism. The Viceroy prospered so well in his mission that before the close of his administration he could, on almost any question, ensure the votes of two-thirds of the House; and he left things in smooth and pleasant train for his successor, Lord Harcourt.

Successes of this kind are commonly followed, in the history of nations, by a severe and exact reckoning-day. The commencement of the American war found Ireland with a bankrupt exchequer, an imbecile government, and an impoverished, distressed, and disaffected people. In the north and the metropolis, pauperised and mendicant manufacturers, ruined by the stoppage of their American trade, disabled by the same cause from emigrating, and compelled to stay crowded up at home, a daily accumulating mass of discontent and incipient insurgency; in the south and west, the provision-trade crushed by embargoes, which, as Arthur Young complains, sacrificed and plundered a whole kingdom to enrich three or four London contractors; at Dublin Castle, bribery beginning to feel the bottom of a beggared and exhausted treasury, and force

*Plowden's "Historical Review," vol. i., p. 386.

This nobleman was both witty himself, and the cause of wit in others. Endless were the good things said by him and of him, both by friend and foe. A lively picture of the politics of the time is to be found in “Baratariana,” a collection of squibs and pasquinades published during this administration.

‡ The financial policy of that time and its results are tersely stated by Grattan, in his speech on the expenses of the nation, February 2, 1778:—

"A corrupt and jobbing policy has driven us to attempt new taxes, which force the condition of trade, and are a premium to smugglers; and a new swarm of smugglers give birth or pretence to a new swarm of revenue officers, with new burdens on the people, and with an army of penal laws; so that the old deficiency of revenue is brought about again by the smuggler who defrauds, and by the job of government that intercepts the revenue, and the practice of running in debt is thus rendered immortal.”

giving way under the necessity of shipping soldiers over the Atlantic; every branch of revenue failing; a militia law of pressing necessity lying by, unexecuted, for want of funds; the Catholics, too, beginning to arise from the death-sleep of eighty years, and seeking from the weakness of government what they might vainly have implored till doomsday of its justice; everywhere a fierce and sullen despondency, relieved only by a malicious satisfaction at seeing England in difficulty and danger, and by hearty sympathy with a cause which all Irishmen felt to be, in its principles and tendencies, their cause ;-such was the condition of Ireland during the first years of the contest of Great Britain with her revolted North American colonies. National insolvency at home and war abroad had completely paralysed the right arm of the "English Interest." The old system of Catholic vassalage to Protestant ascendency, and of Irish vassalage to British ascendency, was fairly worn out and come to a stand-still: and already (in 1777) the British minister had begun to make up his mind to a modicum of commercial and Catholic emancipation, as the only means of saving Ireland's allegiance to the British crown.

As the war went on, matters became daily more critical. The American capture of a British army (October, 1777) was the signal for France, and afterwards for Spain and Holland, to recognise and aid the young Transatlantic republic. The privateers of the allies swept the seas; a French invasion of Ireland was menaced and expected, and Ireland had no troops to repel invasion; and in the month of April, 1778, the Ranger privateer, CAPTAIN PAUL JONES, made a flying visit to the harbour of Belfast. The towns-folk of Belfast, through their chief magistrate, applied to Dublin Castle for protection; and Dublin Castle made answer, by the mouth of one Mr. Richard Heron, a very worthy but not over-bright law-agent and land-steward, whom fortune had cruelly promoted to be Lord Lieutenant's Secretary, that it had no protection to give. The following is a curiosity worth preserving. Little did good dull Mr. Richard Heron, who could not so much as write a business letter in English, dream that his bad grammar would ever come to be good history:

"Dublin Castle, Aug. 14th, 1778. "SIR,-My Lord Lieutenant having received information that there is reason to apprehend three or four privateers, in company, may in a few days make attempts on the northern coasts of this kingdom-by his Excellency's commands I give you the earliest account thereof, in order that there may be a careful watch, and immediate intelligence given to the inhabitants of Belfast, in case any party from such ships should attempt to land.

"The greatest part of the troops being encamped near Clonmell and Kinsale, his excellency cannot at present send no further military force to Belfast, than a troop or two of horse, or part of a company of invalids; and his Excellency desires you will acquaint me, by express, whether a troop or two of horse may be properly accommodated in Belfast, so long as it may be proper to continue them in that town, in addition to the other two troops now there.

"I have the honour to be, &c.,

"RICHARD HERON."

This is a fit ending of one chapter of Irish history, as we shall find it to be the worthy beginning of another. A government which did not re

*We find it in Madden's "United Irishmen," vol. ii., p. 290.

cognise the existence of five-sixths of its subjects, and had no protection to give to the remaining one-sixth-it was time, by all the laws of heaven and earth, that men saw the last of this.

THE VOLUNTEERS OF 1782-" NOW IS OUR TIME"-MISERABLE STATE OF HIS MAJESTY'S TREASURY-DRAGON'S TEETH SPRUNG UP ARMED MEN—“ FREE TRADE, OR ELSE-"-SOMETHING MUST BE DONE-A GREAT ORIGINAL TRANSACTION-SOMETHING IS DONE-LAWYER'S DOUBTS.

Now is our time, said Lord Carhampton to Dr. Jebb, on hearing of the answer of Dublin Castle to Belfast. Truly, it was their time; and the time found men to do its work. The Irish government had abdicated its functions, and forfeited its trust; had refused to the people that protection, the power and the will to give which are the elementary conditions of all government whatever-and the Irish people must protect and help themselves. The Irish people, thus tried, were not found wanting.

Our introductory retrospect of the history of Ireland has now brought us to the epoch of the VOLUNTEER INSTITUTION-that brightest spot in the whole of the Irish annals, which shows all the more brightly in contrast with the gloom that precedes it, and the darker horrors that follow-that time when "the whole faculty of the nation was braced up to the act of her own deliverance," ,"* and achieved her deliverance in the shape of a brief and illusory independence; that independence to be followed by a worse slavery than before-slavery to the corrupt and tyrannical domestic legislature which popular effort had emancipated from foreign control, by years of unsuccessful agitation and defeated rebellion, and ultimately by the extinction of her separate nationality in a legislative union with Great Britain.

In the year 1778 the old system of Anglo-Irish government had fairly worn itself out. The régime of corruption and force had expended the uttermost farthing of its resources, and had nothing to go on with; and the whole thing collapsed and came down-died of sheer inanition. On the 30th of April, in that year, the Lord Lieutenant (Buckingham) writes to Lord North as doleful and piteous an epistle as ever insolvent debtor indited from a sponging-house to a wealthy but penurious relative, informing him, "with great concern," of the "miserable state of his Majesty's treasury;" detailing the utter failure of every one of his financial expedients, the stoppage of all treasury payments except for indispensable military uses, and the entire exhaustion of a banker's loan of 20,000l.; and warning the minister, that if a considerable supply were not sent out without loss of time, "it cannot be said how fatal the consequence may

*Grattan.

be."*

The considerable supply did not arrive, Lord North having more than enough work of his own in hand, in crushing rebellious colonies over the Atlantic; and after two or three further applications, each rising above the other in urgency, the Viceroy writes by express, on the 17th of May—

"I have found further disappointments in respect to money; the bankers to whom I had made application for a further loan of 20,000l. having this morning returned an answer, that the distresses of the public with regard to money are so uncommonly great, that it is not in their power, though very much in their inclination, to give that assistance to government that they would do at another time. I am therefore reduced to the necessity of stopping the movement of the troops until further orders. * Unless a supply can be obtained from England, it will be absolutely impossible to carry forward those preparations which are absolutely necessary for the defence of Ireland in case of any attack."+

*

*

The supplies not coming, or not coming at such time and in such quantities as to render the absolutely necessary preparations in any way possible, Ireland was thrown on her own resources; and never, in all history, did a people develope richer resources on the call of a great occasion. The national distress was deep, but the national heart rose superior to it all. To the answer which Dublin Castle sent to the people's demand for protection, the people's rejoinder was a VOLUNTEER ARMY. Already had some detached volunteer corps been formed in different parts of the country, by public-spirited individuals, in anticipation of local exigencies; but with the summer of 1778, the arming became general and systematic. The metropolis, the counties, the large towns of the northeach poured forth their hosts of armed citizens, self-paid and self-commissioned; even the poor outcast Catholic remembered the country which had forgotten him, and was ready to shed his heart's blood for a constitution which had not deigned to recognise his existence. The enthusiasm of nationality brought out the many, and necessity and fashion enlisted the few who might else have stood aloof; and, in a few months, Ireland had an army of citizen-soldiers, to the number of forty thousand and more, well appointed, well disciplined, and well officered, with the flower of the democracy in its ranks, and the heads of the aristocracy for its commanders-inchief. The government was astounded. Dublin Castle seems to have been afraid, like the Whigs after the Reform Bill, that it was too strong. The notion of an army not commissioned and officered by the crown was altogether new. The whole thing was decidedly unconstitutional-without a precedent in the law books. The government was now between two fires; the French on one side, and the volunteers on the other-with an empty exchequer and a paralysed executive in the middle. It could not possibly do without the volunteers, and yet it did not very well know what to do with them. This embarrassment is very amusingly evinced in the correspondence which from time to time passed on the subject, between Dublin and St. James's. On the 24th of May, 1779, the Lord Lieutenant writes to Lord Weymouth, in reference to "this delicate subject," as he calls it

'Discouragement has been given on my part, as far as might be without offence, at a crisis * "Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan," vol. i., p. 321.

+"Life of Grattan," vol. i., p. 327.

The whole constitution of the volunteer army was republican. The privates elected the officers, and cashiered them, on occasion, for incapacity or misconduct.