The six years which followed the destruction of the Coalition were, in some respects, the most mortifying portion of Burke’s troubled career.  Pitt was more firmly seated in power than Lord North had ever been, and he used his power to carry out a policy against which it was impossible for the Whigs, on their own principles, to offer an effective resistance.  For this is the peculiarity of the king’s first victory over the enemies who had done obstinate battle with him for nearly a quarter of a century.  He had driven them out of the field, but with the aid of an ally who was as strongly hostile to the royal system as they had ever been.  The king had vindicated his right against the Whigs to choose his own ministers; but the new minister was himself a Whig by descent, and a reformer by his education and personal disposition.

Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between the ministry and their opponents.  Here, if anywhere, we might have expected from Burke at least his usual wisdom and patience.  We saw in a previous chapter (p. 33) what the political condition of Ireland was when Burke went there with Hamilton in 1763.  The American war had brought about a great change.  The king had shrewdly predicted that if America became free Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state.  In fact, along with the American war we had to encounter an Irish war also; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at the time, a smothered war.  Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish entered into non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce.  The Irish volunteers, first forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred thousand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the English ministry and Parliament.  Following the spirit, if not the actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for commercial and legislative independence.  They were too strong to be resisted, and in 1782 the Irish Parliament acquired the privilege of initiating and conducting its own business, without the sanction or control either of the Privy Council or of the English Parliament.  Dazzled by the chance of acquiring legislative independence, they had been content with the comparatively small commercial boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke in 1778, and with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed minister in the following year.  After the concession of their independence in 1782, they found that to procure the abolition of the remaining restrictions on their commerce—­the right of trade, for instance, with America and Africa—­the consent of the English legislature was as necessary as it had ever been.  Pitt, fresh from the teaching of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 1785 his famous commercial propositions.  The theory of his scheme was that Irish trade should be free, and that Ireland should be admitted to a permanent participation in commercial advantages.  In return for this gain, after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the navy, in which the two nations had a common interest.  Pitt was to be believed when he declared that of all the objects of his political life this was, in his opinion, the most important that he had ever engaged in, and he never expected to meet another that should rouse every emotion in so strong a degree as this.