The force of principles, and the significance of political achievements, is to be estimated in no small degree by the slenderness of the means available to those who promote them.  And the progress brought about in the Irish Parliament is among the most remarkable on record, because it was effected against the joint resistance of a hostile Executive and of an intolerable constitution.  Of the three hundred members, about two-thirds were nominated by individual patrons and by close corporations.  What was still worse, the action of the Executive was increasingly directed, as the pulse of the national life came to beat more vigorously, to the systematic corruption of the Parliament borough pensions and paid offices.  In the latter part of the century, more than one-third of the members of Parliament were dismissible at pleasure from public emoluments.  If the base influence of the Executive allied itself with the patriotic party, everything might be hoped.  For we must bear in mind not only the direct influence of this expenditure on those who were in possession, but the enormous power of expectancy on those who were not.  Conversely, when the Government were determined to do wrong, there were no means commonly available of forcing it to do right, in any matter that touched either religious bigotry or selfish interest.  With so miserable an apparatus, and in the face of the ever-wakeful Executive sustained by British power, it is rather wonderful how much than how little was effected.  I am not aware of a single case in which a measure on behalf of freedom was proposed by British agency, and rejected by the Irish Parliament.  On the other hand, we have a long list of the achievements of that Parliament due to a courage and perseverance which faced and overcame a persistent English opposition.  Among other exploits, it established periodical elections, obtained the writ of Habeas Corpus, carried the independence of the judges, repealed the Test Act, limited the abominable expenditure on pensions, subjected the acceptance of office from the crown to the condition of re-election, and achieved, doubtless with the powerful aid of the volunteers, freedom of trade with England, and the repeal of Poynings’s Act, and of the British Act of 1719.[96]

All this it did without the manifestation, either within the walls or among the Roman Catholic population, of any disposition to weaken the ties which bound Ireland to the empire.  All this it did; and what had the British Parliament been about during the same period, with its vastly greater means both of self-defence and of action?  It had been building up the atrocious criminal code, tampering in the case of Wilkes with liberty of election, and tampering with many other liberties; driving, too, the American Colonies into rebellion, while, as to good legislation, the century is almost absolutely blank, until between 1782 and 1793 we have the establishment of Irish freedom, the economical reform of Mr. Burke, the financial reforms of Mr. Pitt, the new libel law of Mr. Fox, and the legislative constitution of Canada, in which both these great statesmen concurred.