the efficient government of the country was placed in the hands of its Protestant gentry, qualified by the fact that the English Government possessed a sufficient number of nomination boroughs to exercise a constant controlling influence over their proceedings.  The existing Grand Juries and the Synod of the disestablished Church are the bodies which now represent most faithfully the independent elements in Grattan’s Parliament.  That Parliament consisted exclusively of men who were bound to the English connection by the closest ties of interest and sentiment [and] who were pre-eminently the representatives of property."[51] We may deplore that such a Parliament was doomed to destruction when it might possibly have been saved by reform.  But to any one who has eyes to see it is as clear as day that with Protestant ascendancy, with the prestige of the Established Church, with the leading position of Irish landlords, with the submission of Irish tenants, with the power of control exercised by the English Government, with the necessary dependence of the English Colony upon the connection with England, Grattan’s Constitution with all its possibilities or impossibilities has vanished for ever.  You can no more restore the Parliament of 1782 in Ireland than you can restore the unreformed Parliament of 1832 in England.  In either case to reproduce the form would not renew the spirit, and the attempted revival of an anomaly would turn out the creation of a monstrosity.

One consideration suggested by the memory of Grattan’s Parliament is well worth attention.  With the curious laxity of thought about constitutional changes which marks modern British statesmanship, language is often used which implies that to ask for Grattan’s Parliament is equivalent to asking for Colonial self-government as in Victoria.  No two things are in reality more different.  It is no exaggeration to say that the Constitution of 1782 presented in its principles the exact antithesis to the modern Constitution of Victoria.  Grattan’s Constitution rested on the absolute denial of British Parliamentary sovereignty.  The keynote of his policy was the Parliamentary independence of Ireland; its aim was to make Ireland an independent nation connected with England only by goodwill, by common interest, and by what has been called the “golden link” of the Crown.  The statement indeed that between the date of Irish Parliamentary independence and the date of the Union England and Ireland were governed under two crowns, is not much better than a piece of rhetorical antiquarianism.[52] It is, however, undoubtedly true that from 1782 to 1800 the British Parliament had no more right to legislate for Ireland than at the present day it has to legislate for New York, and no appeal lay from any Irish Court to any English tribunal.  But if under the Constitution of 1782 Ireland was in one sense an independent nation, she could not under that Constitution be called a self-governed country.  The Irish Executive was