of government for Ireland, “a system of a participation and community of benefits, a system of equality and fairness, which, without tending to aggrandize one portion of the empire or to depress the other, should seek the aggregate interest of the whole; it was a substitute for the system which had hitherto been adopted of making the smaller country completely subordinate to and subservient to the greater, of making the smaller and poorer country a mere instrument for the advantage of the greater and wealthier one.  He, therefore, proposed now to create a situation of perfect commercial equality, in which there was to be a community of benefits, and also to some extent a community of burdens.”  And he urged the House to “adopt that system of trade with Ireland that would tend to enrich one part of the empire without impoverishing the other, while it would give strength to both; that, like mercy, the favorite attribute of Heaven,

  “’Is twice blessed—­
  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.’”

It might, he said, be regarded as “a treaty with Ireland by which that country would be put on a fair, equal, and impartial footing with Great Britain, in point of commerce, with respect to foreign countries and our colonies.”  The community of burdens which his measure would impose on Ireland was this:  that whenever the gross hereditary revenue of Ireland should exceed L650,000 (an amount considerably in excess of anything it had ever yet reached), the excess should be applied to the support of the fleet of the United Kingdom.  It was, in fact, a burden that could have no existence at all until the Irish trade had become far more flourishing and productive than as yet it had ever been.  Yet a measure conceived in such a spirit of liberality, and framed with such careful attention to the minutest interests of Irish trade, Mr. Brownlow did not hesitate to denounce as one “tending to make Ireland a tributary nation to Great Britain.  The same terms,” he declared, “had been held out to America, and Ireland had equal spirit with America to reject them.”  He even declared that “it was happy for Mr. Orde” (the Chief Secretary, who had introduced the measure into the Irish House of Commons) “that he was in a country remarkable for humanity.  Had he proposed such a measure in a Polish Diet, he would not have lived to carry back an answer to his master.  If,” he concluded, “the gifts of Britain are to be accompanied with the slavery of Ireland, I will never be a slave to pay tribute; I will hurl back her gifts with scorn.”  Baffled by such frantic and senseless opposition, Pitt condescended to remodel his measure.  In its new form it was not so greatly for the advantage of Ireland.  He had been constrained to admit some limitation of his original liberality by the opposition which, it had met with in England also where Fox, at all times an avowed enemy of freedom of trade, had made himself the mouth-piece of the London and Liverpool