Galway, they found the inhabitants of the district well prepared to receive them, and did not venture to attempt a descent on any part of the island.  And, when the Parliament met in October, some of the members, who saw in the success that could not be denied to have attended their exertions an irresistible means of strengthening the rising pretensions of Ireland to an equality of laws and freedom with England, moved votes of thanks in both Houses to the whole body of Volunteers.  They were carried by acclamation, and the Volunteers of the metropolis lined the streets between the Parliament House and the Castle when, according to custom, the members of the two Houses marched in procession to present their addresses to the Lord-lieutenant.  Such a recognition of the power of this new force stimulated those members who claimed in a special degree the title of Friends of Ireland to greater exertion.  A wiser government than that of Lord North would have avoided giving occasion for the existence of a force which the utter absence of any other had made masters of the situation.  The Volunteers even boasted that they had been called into existence by English misgovernment.  In the words of one of their most eloquent advocates, “England had sown her laws like dragons’ teeth, and they had sprung up as armed men.”

Ireland began to feel that she was strong, and, not unnaturally desired to avail herself of that strength, which England now could not question, to put forward demands for concessions which in common fairness could not well be denied.  In 1778, when Lord North, in the hope of recovering the allegiance of the North American Colonies, brought forward what he termed his conciliatory propositions, the Irish members began to press their demand that the advantages thus offered to the Americans should be extended to their own countrymen also; that the fact of the Irish not having rebelled should not be made a plea for treating them worse than those who had; and in the front of all their requests was one for the abolition of those unjust and vexatious duties which shackled their trade and manufactures.  But the jealousy of the English and Scotch manufacturers was still as bitter, and, unhappily, still as influential, as it had proved in the time of William III.  And, to humor the grasping selfishness of Manchester and Glasgow, Lord North met the demands of the Irish with a refusal of which every word of his speech on the propositions to America was the severest condemnation, and which he sought to mitigate by some new regulations in favor of the linen trade, to which the English and Scotch manufacturers made no objection, since they had no linen factories.  The Irish, in despair, had recourse to non-importation agreements, of which the Americans had set the example, binding themselves not to import nor to use any articles of English or Scotch manufacture with which they could possibly dispense.  And the result was, that Lord North yielded to fear