appointment of Lord Townshend as Lord Lieutenant, and of the new line of policy which he was instructed to pursue. Lord Townshend was brother of the more famous Charles Townshend, whose brilliant but disastrous career closed almost immediately after this appointment. A soldier of some distinction, with considerable talents and popular and convivial manners, he entered upon his administration under very promising circumstances. His first speech from the throne announced and favoured the -project of making the judges irremovable; and a Bill to that effect was accordingly carried through Parliament, but it was returned from England so altered that it was rejected; and this important reform, which had been obtained in England at the Revolution, was not extended to Ireland till 1782. But the unpopularity which resulted from this failure was more than compensated in the following year by the enthusiasm produced by the concession of one of the strongest wishes of the Irish Protestants. The limitation of the duration of Parliament was justly regarded by them as the first condition of all constitutional progress, and Flood had given it a foremost place in his programme of reform. The members of Parliament, very naturally, disliked it, but they did not venture to resist the popular outcry; they felt secure that if they passed the Bill it would be afterwards rejected in England; and they were not averse to obtaining in this manner some popularity with their constituents. This little comedy was played three times, but in 1768 the English Cabinet resolved to yield. They were not uninfluenced by the violent commotion that had arisen in Ireland, by the unpopularity produced by the defeat of the Judges Bill, and by a belief that shorter parliaments would break the power of the Irish aristocracy, and they especially desired to strengthen the hands of Lord Townshend

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for obtaining a measure on which they had greatly set their hearts-an augmentation of the army on the Irish establishment from 12,000 to 15,000. The limitation Bill as it passed through Parliament was a septennial one, but it was changed in England into an octennial one, which was better suited to a Parliament that only sat every second year, and in that form it became law. The policy of Flood and Lucas had so far triumphed, and the Parliament became in some real sense an organ of the popular will. Townshend had also held out hopes that the English Government were prepared to consider with favour the demand for a Habeas Corpus Act and for the creation of a national militia.

The Lord Lieutenant, however, who was the object of a general enthusiasm in the beginning of 1768, was destined to become one of the most unpopular who have ever ruled in Ireland, and to give an unprecedented impulse to the national spirit. As I have already said, it had been the custom of his predecessors to reside very little in Ireland, and the management of Parliament was chiefly in the hands of four or five great borough-owners, who undertook to carry on the business of the Government in consideration of obtaining a monopoly of its patronage. This system Lord Townshend resolved to destroy. If his object had been simply to check corruption, or to make Parliament in some degree popular, it would have been laudable, and a Lord Lieutenant who was habitually resident was sure to be acceptable to Dublin; but the real end of his policy was of a different nature. The great Irish families were grasping, rapacious and corrupt; but they also constituted in some measure an independent Irish party, and Lord Townshend was instructed to break their power, to restore to the Executive the patronage and influence which they had gradually intercepted, to make the Lord Lieutenant once

more the real and efficient governor of the country, and the Parliament directly and exclusively subservient to his influence.

The first dispute was about the Augmentation of the Irish army. It was contended in opposition to it that the finances of the country were not in the position to support a considerable addition to the expenditure; that the existing force of 12,000 men, if compared with the army raised in England, was a more than sufficient contribution on the part of Ireland to the defence of the Empire; that there was an enormous amount of jobbing in the Irish army which made it proportionately much more expensive than the army in England; that while the new troops were mainly intended for Colonial garrisons, Ireland was bound neither by sympathy nor interest to assist in the subjugation of America, and that though supported by Irish revenues, the Irish army was raised and governed under an English and not under an Irish statute. The Government made, however, two very valuable concessions. One, which was especially pleasing to the Irish country gentry, was that Ireland should no longer be liable in time of war to be left denuded of troops, for it was to be provided that, except in the gravest emergency, 12,000 out of the 15,000 soldiers could not be removed from Ireland without the assent of the Irish Parliament. The other was that the Irish battalions should be assimilated to the English ones, and the excessive number of officers, and especially of absentee generals, reduced. On the whole the measure appears to have been received under these conditions with a considerable amount of favour, though Flood remained discontented, but the Undertakers, who had hitherto carried on the Government, after much bargaining about terms for themselves, refused to support it, and in the first of Lord Townshend's Parliaments they

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succeeded in defeating it. Nearly at the same time the Habeas Corpus Bill, which had passed through the Irish Parliament, was rejected by the Privy Council in England.

Townshend believed that the Augmentation Bill when coupled with the clause securing the presence of 12,000 men in Ireland, was not really unpopular with the independent country gentlemen. The opposition of Flood does not appear at this time to have been at all decided, and Townshend had great hopes of soon bringing him into office. Flood had vehemently attacked the custom of appointing Englishmen to the chief judicial posts in Ireland, and on the death of Chancellor Bowes, Townshend did his utmost to procure an Irishman as a successor, but the English Cabinet, acting on the advice of Lord Camden and Lord Northington, refused their consent; and he also tried, though equally unsuccessfully, to induce the Government to consent to some relaxation of the commercial code. But his first object was now to break down the ascendency of the aristocracy of large borough-owners in the Irish Parliament, and to establish the full and entire supremacy of the English Executive. The constitutional dependency of the Parliament was emphatically asserted, and the result of this policy was that the great aristocratic families were thrown into a close though temporary alliance with the party of Flood and of the Patriots.

The Octennial Bill having been carried, Parliament was dissolved on May 28, 1768, but the new Parliament did not meet till the October of the following year. During this long interval there had been a great deal of bargaining with a view of obtaining a Government majority. Several supporters of Townshend were made peers or baronets or promoted in the peerage. It was clearly shown that the Lord Lieutenant and not the Irish oligarchy was now to be the true source of Government patronage. There was much

negotiation with the smaller borough-owners and with the independent members. The Augmentation Bill was made more acceptable by an express stipulation that it was only in the case of invasion, or rebellion in Great Britain that the 12,000 men could be withdrawn without the consent of the Parliament, and that the Irish army should be established on the authority of an Irish and not, as hitherto, on the authority of an English Act of Parliament. By this last concession Hely Hutchinson was induced to support the Government. On the whole, Lord Townshend believed that he had secured a majority in the coming Parliament, though he was under no illusion about the corrupt motives that governed its leading members.

His hopes, however, were soon deceived. The struggle in the new Parliament began upon the question of a Money Bill. A large proportion of the Irish members had always, as I have said, aimed at obtaining for their House a complete control of the national purse, and the practice of originating or altering Money Bills in England had always been resented. It was contended by some on very doubtful grounds that this practice was illegal; by others that, even if strictly legal, it was incompatible with all national independence, and that the Commons should resist it by the exercise of their undoubted right of rejecting any Money Bill which did not originate with themselves. A Money Bill originated by the Privy Council in 1769 was rejected by the first Octennial Parliament, as a similar Bill had been in the previous Parliament; but, instead of following the usual course of doing so without assigning any reason, the new Parliament declared in its resolution that the Bill was rejected because it did not take its rise in the House of Commons. Having taken this step, the House proceeded to prove its loyalty to the Crown by voting unusually large supplies and by passing the Augmentation Bill; but no