POLICY OF THE IRISH GOVERNMENT 147 a connection with the Protestant realm of England.'' Grattan's answer to one of their addresses was very characteristic. 'I love the Roman Catholic; I am a friend to his liberty, but it is only inasmuch as his liberty is entirely consistent with your ascendency, and an addition to the strength and freedom of the Protestant community.'" Those who would fully study this most critical period of Irish history will find their best materials in the confidential correspondence of the Irish Government with the English ministers. In a sketch like the present such a study is impossible, but I have already indicated the leading principles that animated the chief persons in the administration of Ireland. They desired to resist persistently all steps towards parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation. They maintained that the existing system gave the Executive a complete and absolute control over the Parliament, and that this control should never be weakened or abandoned, and the idea was clearly present to the minds of some of them that the one possible alternative was a legislative union, and that the dissension between Protestant and Catholic, the fears of the Protestants and the hopes or the despair of the Catholics might help to make it feasible. At the end of 1792 they tried to persuade the English ministers that the Catholic question had been settled for a long period. Nothing, they urged, but a bold attitude on the part of the English ministers was needed to allay the agitation. The belief that the English Government favoured Catholic concession had alone made the demand for it formidable, and the great danger of the present moment lay in the belief that the 1 MacNevin's Pieces of Irish History, p. 29. * Miscellaneous Works, p. 289. This letter was written June 1, 1792, English Government might renew this policy. It was with extreme reluctance that the Irish ministers acquiesced in the injunction of Pitt that they were to use no language shutting the door to future concessions. Beyond all other things it was now necessary that England should declare unequivocally her determination to support the Protestant Constitution of Ireland; that she should utter a decisive word barring the way to new concessions. The decisive word was indeed uttered, but it was not that which the Irish Government desired. Pitt and Dundas had long thought that the time had come when some real power must be granted to the Irish Catholics, and they had warned the Irish Government that if a civil war broke out merely on the question of Protestant monopoly, England would not support them. The strenuous opposition of their representatives on the spot had naturally perplexed and alarmed them, and they for a time yielded to the judgment of those who might be supposed to have better means of judging than themselves. But they were now clearly convinced that their original policy was a wise one. The great French war was on the eve of breaking out, and with all the signs of revolution multiplying in Ulster they believed that further delay would be folly. Nor was the small concession proposed in 1792 likely to be sufficient. A power of voting on a higher qualification for the sixty-four county members in the Irish Parliament, leaving all other seats under purely Protestant control, was not likely to allay the agitation. A large and liberal measure must be granted, and granted speedily. By their express direction a paragraph announcing a new Relief Bill was inserted in the speech from the Throne, and the promise was fulfilled by a Bill which a few months before would have seemed im RELIEF BILL OF 1793 149 possible. It gave the elective franchise to the Catholics both in the counties and in the boroughs, and on the same terms as to Protestants. It freely admitted them to the grand juries and the petty juries. They were to be allowed to endow colleges, universities and schools, and to receive degrees in Dublin University. They were enabled to become magistrates, and to vote for magistrates in corporations, to hold commmissions in the army and navy. With some specified exceptions, all civil offices were to be thrown open, and any remaining provisions which imposed disabilities upon them respecting personal property were to be abolished. The right to carry arms also was to be no longer dependent on creed. It was granted to all creeds alike, but subject to a property qualification. This measure was by far the largest and most liberal concession ever made to the Irish Catholics, and, measured by the real transfer of power it involved, it was incomparably more important than the later measure of Catholic Emancipation. If the Irish Protestant Parliament deserves some credit for accepting it, the whole credit of the initiative, at least, belongs to the English ministers, who imposed their policy on their most unwilling representatives in Ireland. It is unnecessary here to follow the course of the debates. It is sufficient to say that the measure in all its leading provisions was carried by the Irish Parliament, and carried with no serious difficulty. The momentous clause, transferring to the Irish Catholics a vast numerical preponderance of county votes, passed by 144 votes to 72. It was hoped that by so great a concession the Catholics would be effectually detached from the republicans of the north, and that a reform of Parliament would be averted. Looking back, however, on this page of history in the light of the event, it is impossible not to be sensible of how unfortunately, and in some respects how unskilfully, this great question was managed. It would have been far better if a measure of enfranchisement— even if it had been much less comprehensive-had been carried in the previous year, before the French war had broken out, and the republican spirit in Ulster had reached its present height; and it was nothing short of a calamity that the task of carrying it should have been entrusted to the administration of Lord Westmorland. The very ministers who only a few months before had been openly declaring that the smallest concession of political power to the Catholics would be ruinous, who had induced the House of Commons to take the extreme step of refusing even to receive a petition for the removal of Catholic disabilities, who had raised the banner of Protestant ascendency in the country, and led or instigated a fierce agitation in favour of uncompromising resistance, these very ministers had now to introduce and carry a measure of almost unlimited concession. Fitzgibbon at least openly avowed in Parliament his scorn for the policy he supported. Is it surprising that a measure carried by such men, and in such a manner, failed to strengthen the Government or to bring with it moral weight? Nor was the measure in its most essential parts a wise one. It gave at once too much and too little. It placed votes in the hands of almost the whole pauper tenantry of Ireland. The forty-shilling freeholders comprised the vast bulk of the most ignorant, the most turbulent, the most impoverished Catholic farmers. Not through their own fault-they were wholly uneducated, absolutely indifferent to politics, abjectly superstitious, and abjectly poor, and in many great districts not even capable of speaking or under EFFECTS OF THE ACT OF 1793 151 standing the English tongue. It would be impossible to conceive a class less fitted for the independent and intelligent exercise of political power. The Catholic leaders themselves in 1792 had only asked for the suffrage on a higher plane, and although a distinction. between Protestant and Catholic electors might not have been permanent, a 207. franchise at the end of the eighteenth century would have comprised all that was really intelligent and weighty in the Catholic population. Putting aside a few great towns, the representation of the counties was the one sound portion of the Irish House of Commons. In a Parliament of rotten nomination boroughs it on the whole represented faithfully and honestly the opinions of the Protestants of Ireland. Could the county constituencies be expected to retain their character when the overwhelming majority of the voters were such men as I have described? Nor was this all. The more temperate advocates of a reform of the Irish Parliament always looked forward to two measures as likely to correct its abuses. One of these was the remedy that Chatham had proposed in England-to strengthen the sound element in the Parliament by increasing the county representation. The other was to transform the small and nomination boroughs by including in their electorate portions of the surrounding country. In three provinces of Ireland the first effect of both of these measures would now be to increase the ascendency of the forty-shilling freeholder. It was no sufficient answer to say that the Protestants already possessed this franchise and that it seemed to work well. In a Constitution as oligarchical as that of Ireland it was very desirable that there should be some infusion of a pure democracy; and the Protestant forty-shilling freeholders of Ireland were in this |