III. Home Rule as the revival of Grattan’s Constitution.—­The cry for Home Rule sometimes takes the form of a demand that Ireland should reacquire the Constitution of 1782.  The true answer to this demand is not to be found where Englishmen often seek for it, in attacks on Grattan’s Parliament.  That body exhibited some grave defects common to the English Parliament of the day; it had also many faults of its own to answer for; but it had with all its demerits virtues which still cast a halo round its memory in the eyes of Irish patriotism, and which serve to redeem many of its admitted faults in the judgment of impartial history.  It produced great men.  Flood, Grattan, Curran, and Fitzgibbon were none of them faultless statesmen, but they were leaders of whom any people have a right to be proud.  Grattan’s Parliament, moreover, though it represented a class, represented a class of Irishmen, and we may even say the best class of Irishmen.  It was lastly, with all its defects, a Parliament of men who knew and belonged to Ireland, and after its lights cared for the country.  It was in a true sense a national Parliament.  When we consider further that the Parliament was abolished against the wish of the best men in Ireland, that it was abolished by arts which have brought lasting and just discredit on the men who carried through the Act of Union, we can well understand why as calm and as well-informed judges as Mr. Lecky hold to the belief—­certainly in nowise in itself unreasonable—­that the Treaty of Union was, to say the least, premature, and that England and Ireland would have gained much if for a generation or two more the interest and repute of Ireland had been guarded by an Irish Parliament.  The argument that the Irish Parliament because it was corrupt, or because it represented a class, was rightly abolished, proves too much.  The English Parliament under Walpole was at least as open as the Irish Parliament in the time of Grattan to each of these charges, yet long before legislation had removed the flagrant anomalies of the unreformed House of Commons the English Parliament had cast off its worst vices, and few persons will maintain that England would have gained if during the time of Walpole Parliamentary government had been abolished.  Be this as it may, vituperation of Grattan’s Parliament is for our present purpose as irrelevant as it is unjust and injudicious.

[Sidenote:  True objection, restoration impossible.]

The true reason for declining to consider the demand for the Constitution of 1782 is, that to concede it is in the strictest sense of the word an impossibility.  Grattan’s Constitution not only is dead, but can look for no resurrection.  The social, the political, the religious, we might almost say the physical conditions under which Grattan’s Parliament existed have vanished, never to return.  “It cannot be too clearly understood,” writes Mr. Lecky, “that the real meaning of the separate Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century was that