A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament.  There, while nobody could deny that the eleven propositions would benefit the mercantile interests of the country, it was passionately urged that the last of the propositions, that which concerned the apportionment of Irish revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslavement of their unhappy island.  Their fetters, they went on, were clenched, if the English Government was to be allowed thus to take the initiative in Irish legislation.  The factious course pursued by the English Opposition was much less excusable than the line of the Anglo-Irish leaders.  Fox, who was ostentatiously ignorant of political economy, led the charge.  He insisted that Pitt’s measures would annihilate English trade, would destroy the Navigation Laws, and with them would bring our maritime strength to the ground.  Having thus won the favour of the English manufacturers, he turned round to the Irish Opposition, and conciliated them by declaring with equal vehemence that the propositions were an insult to Ireland, and a nefarious attempt to tamper with her new-born liberties.  Burke followed his leader.  We may almost say that for once he allowed his political integrity to be bewildered.  In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the pressure which his mercantile constituents in Bristol had endeavoured to put upon him; he had warmly supported the Irish claims, and had lost his seat in consequence.  The precise ground which he took up in 1785 was this.  He appears to have discerned in Pitt’s proposals the germ of an attempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical in purpose, principle, and probable effect with the ever-memorable attempt to extract revenue from the American colonies.  Whatever stress may be laid upon this, we find it hard to vindicate Burke from the charge of factiousness.  Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than the sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws from the Irish revenue instead of checking profligate expenditure in India.

Pitt’s alternative was irresistible.  Situated as Ireland was, she must either be the subservient instrument of English prosperity, or else she must be allowed to enjoy the benefits of English trade, taking at the same time a proportionate share of the common burdens.  Adam Smith had shown that there was nothing incompatible with justice in a contribution by Ireland to the public debt of Great Britain.  That debt, he argued, had been contracted in support of the government established by the Revolution; a government to which the Protestants of Ireland owed not only the whole authority which they enjoyed in their own country, but every security which they possessed for their liberty, property, and religion.  The neighbourhood of Ireland to the shores of the mother country introduced an element into the problem, which must have taught every unimpassioned observer that the American solution would be inadequate for a dependency