Although the Parliament had now become independent, there was still nothing like a responsible ministry as we now understand it, and the government managed to maintain its control, partly by the peculiar composition of the Parliament (to which I have already referred), and partly by the disposal of favours.  And it cannot be denied that the Parliament passed much useful legislation.  Two questions, however, were now coming forward on which the whole political condition of the country depended, and which were closely entwined with one another.  The first was the reform of the legislature, so as to make the House of Commons a really representative body; the second was the final abolition of the Penal Laws.  As to reform, the Parliament was naturally slow (did any political assembly in the world ever divest itself of its own privileges without pressure from without?); but as to the abolition of the Penal Laws there was a cordiality which is remarkable, and which is seldom referred to by the Nationalist writers of the present day when they discourse about the Penal Laws.  With regard to social matters—­such as admission to Corporations, taking Degrees at the University, and holding medical professorships,—­there was hardly any hesitation; the political question, however, was more difficult.  In both England and Ireland at that time a forty-shilling freehold gave a vote.  That was a matter of slight importance in England, as the number of small freeholders was limited, land being usually let for a term of years.  In Ireland, however, the ordinary arrangement was for peasants to hold their scraps of land for life; and land having recently increased in value enormously, a large proportion of these were of the value of forty shillings.  Hence, the whole constituency would be altered; thousands of new electors, all of them poor and illiterate, would be added in many constituencies; and the representation of the country would at once pass into Roman Catholic hands.  To fix a higher qualification for Roman Catholics than for Protestants would be not to abolish but to perpetuate the Penal Laws; to deprive the existing voters of the franchise was out of the question; hence the franchise was granted but not without considerable hesitation on the part of the more thoughtful members.  On the other hand it was urged with great force that to give these privileges to the uneducated mass but to continue the disabilities of the Roman Catholic gentry by not allowing them to sit in Parliament was absurd.  The proposal to abolish the religious test in the case of Members of Parliament was, however, defeated.

Looking back, with the light of later history to aid us, it is interesting to see how much more correct were Lord Clare’s predictions of the future than Grattan’s.  Grattan (as I have already explained), taking his ideas from his lay friends among the cultured classes, and seeing the decline of the Papal influence on the continent, considered that anyone who regarded Popery as a political influence