the political leadership largely passed to the Roman Catholic Church, which very naturally defended the religion common to the members of all the clans, by trying to unite them against the English enemy.  Nationality, in this sense, of course applied only to Celtic Roman Catholic Ireland.  The first real idea of a United Ireland arose out of the third cause, the religious grievances of the Protestant dissenters and the commercial grievances of the Protestant manufacturers and artisans in the eighteenth century, who suffered under a common disability with the Roman Catholics, and many of whom came in the end to make common cause with them.  But even long after this conception had become firmly established, the local representative institutions corresponding to those which formed the political training of the English in law and administration either did not exist in Ireland or were altogether in the hands of a small aristocracy, mostly of non-Irish origin, and wholly non-Catholic.  O’Connell’s great work in freeing Roman Catholic Ireland from the domination of the Protestant oligarchy showed the people the power of combination, but his methods can hardly be said to have fostered political thought.  The efforts in this direction of men like Gavan Duffy, Davis, and Lucas were neutralised by the Famine, the after effects of which also did much to thwart Butt’s attempts to develop serious public opinion amongst a people whose political education had been so long delayed.  The prospect of any early fruition of such efforts vanished with the revolutionary agrarian propaganda, and independent thinking—­so necessary in the modern democratic state—­never replaced the old leader-following habit which continued until the climax was reached under Parnell.

The political backwardness of the Irish people revealed itself characteristically when, in 1884, the English and Irish democracies were simultaneously endowed with a greatly extended franchise.  In theory this concession should have developed political thought in the people and should have enhanced their sense of political responsibility.  In England no doubt this theory was proved by the event to be based on fact; but in Ireland it was otherwise.  Parnell was at the zenith of his power.  The Irish had the man, what mattered the principles?  The new suffrages simply became the figures upon the cheques handed over to the Chief by each constituency, with the request that he would fill in the name of the payee.  On one or two occasions a constituency did protest against the payee, but all that was required to settle the matter was a personal visit from the Chief.  Generally speaking, the electorate were quite docile, and instances were not wanting of men discovering that they had found favour with electors to whom their faces and even their names were previously unknown.