jealousy which had led them in William’s reign to require the suppression of the Irish woollen manufacture, now, in Anne’s, rose against the proposal of a legislative union.[133] In blindness which was not only fatal but suicidal also, “they persuaded themselves that the union would make Ireland rich, and that England’s interest was to keep her poor;” as if it had been possible for one portion of the kingdom to increase in prosperity without every other portion benefiting also by the improvement.

However, in the reign of Anne the union was a question only of expediency or of wisdom.  The wide divergence of the two Parliaments on this question of the Regency transformed it into a question of necessity.  The King might have a relapse; the Irish Parliament, on a recurrence of the crisis, might re-affirm its late resolutions; might frame another address to the Prince of Wales; and there might be no alternative between seeing two different persons Regents of England and Ireland, or, what would be nearly the same thing, seeing the same person Regent of the two countries on different grounds, and exercising a different authority.

And if these proceedings of the Irish Parliament had wrought in the mind of the great English minister a conviction of the absolute necessity of preventing a recurrence of such dangers by the only practicable means open to him—­the fusion of it into one body with the English Parliament by a legislative union—­the occurrences of the ensuing ten years enforced that conviction with a weight still more irresistible.  It has been seen how stirring an influence the revolutionary fever engendered by the overthrow of the French monarchy for a time exerted even over the calmer temper of Englishmen.  In Ireland, where, ever since Sarsfield and his brave garrison enlisted under the banner of Louis XIV., a connection more or less intimate with France had been constantly kept up, the events in Paris had produced a far deeper and wider effect.  More than one demagogue among the Volunteers had avowed a desire to see the whole country transfer its allegiance from the English to the French sovereign; and this preference was more pronounced after the triumph of democracy in the French capital.  For the leaders of the movement, themselves nearly all men of the lowest degree, denounced the Irish nobles with almost as much vehemence as the English connection.

Yet Pitt’s policy, dictated partly by a spirit of conciliation, and still more by feelings of justice, was gradually removing many of the grievances of which the Irish had real reason to complain.  Next to the restrictions on trade, nothing had made such an impression on his mind as the iniquity of the penal laws; and those he proceeded to repeal, encouraging the introduction of bills to throw open the profession of the law to Roman Catholics, to allow them seats on the magistrates’ bench and commissions in the army, and to grant them the electoral franchise,