But we have not yet reached the climax of Irish advancement.  When, in 1782 and 1783, the legislative relations of the two countries were fundamentally rectified by the formal acknowledgment of Irish nationality, the beginning of a great work was accomplished; but its final consummation, though rendered practicable and even easy, depended wholly on the continuing good intention of the British Cabinet.  The Acts of 1782 and 1783 required a supplemental arrangement, to obviate those secondary difficulties in the working of the two Legislatures, which supplied Mr. Pitt with his main parliamentary plea for the Union.  What was yet more important was the completion of the scheme in Ireland itself.  And this under three great heads:  (1) The purification of Parliament by a large measure of reform; (2) the abolition of all Roman Catholic disabilities; (3) the establishment of a proper relation between the Legislative and the Executive powers.  It is often urged, with cynical disregard to justice and reason, that with the Grattan Parliament we had corruption, coercion, discontent, and finally rebellion.  But the political mischiefs, which disfigure the brief life of the Grattan Parliament, and the failure to obtain the two first of the three great purposes I have named, were all in the main due to the third grand flaw in the Irish case after 1782.  I mean the false position, and usually mischievous character, of the Irish Executive, which, with its army of placemen and expectants in Parliament, was commonly absolute master of the situation.  Well does Mr. Swift MacNeill,[97] in his very useful work, quote the words of Mr. Fox in 1797:  “The advantages, which the form of a free Government seemed to promise, have been counteracted by the influence of the Executive Government, and of the British Cabinet.”

There were five Viceroys between 1782 and 1790.  Then came a sixth, Lord Westmoreland, the worst of them all, whose political judgment was on a par with his knowledge of the English language.[98] The great settlement of 1782-3 was in the main worked by men who were radically adverse to its spirit and intention.  But they were omnipotent in their control of the unreformed.  Parliament of Ireland, more and more drenched, under their unceasing and pestilent activity, with fresh doses of corruption.  Westmoreland and his myrmidons actually persuaded Pitt, in 1792, that Irish Protestantism and its Parliament were unconquerably adverse to the admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise; but when the proposal was made from the Throne in 1793, notwithstanding the latent hostility of the Castle, the Parliament passed the Bill with little delay, and “without any serious opposition."[99] The votes against it were one and three on two divisions[100] respectively.  A minority of sixty-nine supported, against the Government, a clause for extending the measure to seats in Parliament.  That clause, lost by a majority of ninety-four, might apparently have been carried, but for “Dublin Castle,” by an even larger majority.