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2 LEADERS OF PUBLIC OPINION IN IRELAND

This was one of the rare instances in the first half of the eighteenth century in which the Irish Parliament asserted clearly its independent will. It was in truth a body so powerless and so subservient that, although a few signs of an independent spirit were occasionally shown, its proceedings present during this period very few features of any interest. It enacted, with scarcely a division, the penal laws which reduced the Irish Catholics to absolute impotence. It was compelled to acquiesce, though not without some remonstrance, in the long series of commercial disabilities which destroyed all Irish commerce and almost all Irish manufactures, but it passed a good deal of useful legislation about roads and harbours and public works and nascent industries, and it showed a decided will of its own on questions relating to Irish finance.

One of the results of the repeated confiscations that had taken place in Ireland was that the Crown possessed a large Irish hereditary revenue, which in the middle of the eighteenth century amounted to nearly 450,000l. a year, independent of Parliamentary control. It was treated by the Crown as a kind of Privy Purse, and it provided among other things for a large pension list, which was bestowed in a manner that would never have been tolerated in England. The mistresses, the bastards, and some of the foreign relations of several successive sovereigns were thus provided for, as well as many persons who had rendered services-sometimes of a very dubious character— wholly unconnected with Ireland. Under the Stuarts the hereditary revenue had been found sufficient for the government of the country, and for a long period no Parliament met in Ireland. It was only when the expenses of the Revolution made this revenue insufficient, that the custom began of summoning Parliament

THE IRISH PARLIAMENT

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every second year for the purpose of voting additional supplies, and it soon appeared evident that the Commons desired to exercise over those supplies the same powers that were exercised by the English House of Commons over English finance. It regarded these duties as entirely its own grant, and insisted that Bills of Supply should originate in the Irish House of Commons, that they should not, as was the custom, be sent over to them for ratification from England, and that when they had received the assent of the House of Commons they should not be altered by the Privy Council.

In 1692, when the first Irish Parliament after the Revolution was summoned, a violent quarrel arose which was the precursor of many similar disputes. Two Bills of Supply were transmitted to Ireland as a cause for summoning the Parliament. The Commons passed one on account of pressing emergencies, but accompanied it with a resolution declaring that this was not to be considered a precedent. It rejected the other because it had not taken its rise in that House. At a later period there were protests which were not wholly ineffectual against the growth of the Pension List and against some of its most scandalous items. There was an attempt to check one of the worst forms of Irish maladministration by the imposition of a tax of 4d. in the pound upon salaries and pensions of habitual absentees, but it was almost wholly ineffectual, as the Crown retained the right of exempting them by sign manual. Both Houses of Parliament supported Swift in his protest against Wood's halfpence, and a few years later a vote of the House of Commons defeated a design of the Government to place the supplies which had been voted for the payment of the principal and interest of the National Debt beyond its control. Some serious embezzlements in the erection of barracks

were pointed out and punished. There was a law for encouraging tillage by providing that five out of every hundred acres should be under the plough; but it was more than counteracted by the resolution to which I have already referred, exempting pasture land from the payment of tithes.

Acts were carried for building churches; for establishing foundling hospitals and workhouses in Dublin and Cork; for naturalizing foreign Protestants who brought new industries and a higher standard of civilisation into Ireland; for settling such Protestants in different parts of Ireland; for making the affirmation of Quakers equivalent to an oath; for making roads and harbours, and stimulating different forms of industry by bounties. Large political questions scarcely ever appeared on the parliamentary scene, and there was little or no serious party and political division.

The Union between England and Scotland took place in 1707, and it was accompanied by the establishment of free trade between the two countries. In the work of Molyneux, which was published in 1698, and which was the great text-book of the advocates of the legislative independence of Ireland, there is a significant passage showing how gladly a similar union with free trade would have been accepted as an alternative. The author mentions that under Edward III. Irish members were summoned to a Parliament in England, and he adds that if it may be inferred from this fact that the Parliament of England might bind Ireland, it must also be allowed that the people of Ireland ought to have representatives in the Parliament of England, 'and this,' adds Molyneux, 'I believe we should be willing enough to embrace; but this is a happiness we can hardly hope for.'

The possibility of a legislative union with England

PROPOSALS FOR AN UNION

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which would give Ireland the great benefit of free trade was at this time present to many minds, and the discussions which led to the Scotch Union naturally strengthened it. In 1703, four years before the Scotch Union, both Houses of the Irish Parliament concurred in a representation to the Queen in favour of such a measure, and in 1707 the House of Commons, in an address congratulating the Queen on the accomplishment of the Scotch Union, added, 'May God put it into your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown by a yet more comprehensive union.' There is much evidence that about this time the ablest men in Ireland ardently desired a legislative union as the best means of securing the prosperity of Ireland without interfering with that of England. Such a measure, accompanied by freedom of trade and manufactures, would probably have then encountered no opposition in Ireland; it would have been welcomed by men of all classes and creeds, and it is difficult to exaggerate the difference it might have made, both in her political and industrial history. It was the spirit of trade monopoly which then prevailed in England that made it impossible. The great opportunity was lost. The English ministers refused to listen to the overtures of the Irish Parliament, and they preferred the alternative of governing Ireland through a completely subservient legislature.

It has been noticed that the most severe of the penal laws against the Catholics immediately followed the rejection of the overtures for an union. Such a measure would have consolidated the Protestant interest, and secured the whole weight of English influence in favour of the existing disposition of power and property. The Irish Protestants now perceived that they must rely mainly if not solely on themselves to secure

their lives, their property, and their power from the conquered majority. The depression of the Catholics. became still more decidedly the object of their policy, and this policy combined with the commercial disabilities to drive the most energetic Irishmen to other lands, and to sink the great mass of the people into poverty and impotence.

The Protestant interest, though it held ostensibly a complete monopoly of power and wealth, was in truth by no means flourishing. Nearly all the more important and lucrative places in Church and State were given to Englishmen, and this patronage-especially the portion relating to the Church-was scandalously abused. Very many of the great lay officials and even of the bishops of the Church were habitual absentees, and the best posts in Ireland were made the reward of purely English services. A large proportion of the great landlords were also absentees. They had acquired vast tracts of confiscated land exclusively occupied by Irish-speaking Catholics utterly differing in ideas and tendencies from those in which the new landlords had been brought up. Not unnaturally under these circumstances the object of a Protestant and probably English landlord was to transfer the management of these properties to another. The social influence attaching to a great landowner was delegated to a man of a lower class. A large tenant, who must by law be a Protestant, was given a very long lease over the whole estate at a rent which was usually moderate at the time when the lease was given, and which long before the expiry of the seventy or eighty years during which it had to run became absurdly low. From this great middleman the real owner derived a small but secure revenue, and this was in numerous cases his only connection with the soil. Unfortunately the immediate

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