So that the Primate Boulter, during his government of Ireland, complains[79] that Englishmen are still less than one-half the whole body of Bishops, although the most important sees were to a large extent in their hands.  The same practice was followed in the higher judicial offices.  Fitzgibbon was the first Irishman who became Lord Chancellor.[80] The Viceroy, commonly absent, was represented by Lords Justices, who again were commonly English; and Primate Boulter, a most acute and able man, jealous of an Irish Speaker in that character, recommends that the commander of the forces should take his place.[81] When, later on, the Viceroy resided, it was a rule that the Chief Secretary should be an Englishman.  On the occasion when Lord Castlereagh was by way of exception admitted to that office, an apology was found for it in his entire devotion to English policy and purposes.  “His appointment,” says Lord Cornwallis, “gives me great satisfaction, as he is so very unlike an Irishman!"[82] Resources were also found in the military profession, and among the voters for the Union we find the names of eight[83] English generals.

The arrangements under Poynings’s Law, and the commercial proscription, drove the iron ever deeper and deeper into the souls of Irishmen.  It is but small merit in the Irish Parliament of George I. and George II., if under these circumstances a temper was gradually formed in, and transmitted by, them, which might one day achieve the honours of patriotism.  It was in dread of this most healthful process, that the English Government set sedulously to work for its repression.  The odious policy was maintained by a variety of agencies; by the misuse of Irish revenue, a large portion of which was unhappily under their control; by maintaining the duration of the Irish House of Commons for the life of the Sovereign; and, worst of all, by extending the range of corruption within the walls, through the constant multiplication of paid offices tenable by members of Parliament without even the check of re-election on acceptance.

Thus by degrees those who sat in the Irish Houses came to feel both that they had a country, and that their country had claims upon them.  The growth of a commercial interest in the Roman Catholic body must have accelerated the growth of this idea, as that interest naturally fell into line with the resistance to the English prescriptive laws.  But the rate of progress was fearfully slow.  It was hemmed in on every side by the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests:  the interest of the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold unscrupulous interest of a landlords’ Parliament against the occupier of the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied there the yet more disastrous