The root of the American trouble, leading to the separation of the Colonies, was political and wholly unconnected with religion.  The root of the Irish trouble, adventitiously connected with religion, lay, and lies still, in the Irish political system.  Other evils were transient and curable; this was permanent.  The Penal Code was eventually relaxed; the disabilities of the Dissenters were eventually removed; the commercial servitude was abolished, but the political system in essentials has never been changed.  Let us see what it was and how it worked at the period we are considering, again by comparison with America.

Though the word “plantation” was applied alike to the colonization of Ireland and America, Ireland was never called a Colony, but a Kingdom.  The distinction was not scientific, and operated, like all other distinctions, to the injury of Ireland.  Neither country was represented in the British Parliament.  In both countries the representatives of the Crown were appointed by England, and controlled, in America almost completely, in Ireland absolutely, the Executive and Judges.  In Ireland the Viceroy was always an Englishman; in America, the Governors of a few of the non-proprietary Colonies were colonials, but most Governors were English, and some of the proprietary class were absentees.[11] In the case both of Ireland and America the English Government claimed a superior right of control over legislation and taxation, and in both cases it was found necessary to remove all doubts as to this right by passing Declaratory Acts, for Ireland in 1719, for America in 1766.  The great difference lay in the Legislature, and was the result of different degrees of remoteness from the seat of power.  America was profoundly democratic from the beginning, outpacing the Mother Country by fully two centuries.  There was no aristocracy, and in most Colonies little distinction between upper and middle classes.  The popular Assemblies, elected on the broadest possible franchise, were truly representative.  Some of the Legislative Councils, or Upper Chambers, were elective also.  Most of them, although nominated, and therefore inclined to be hostile to the popular body, were nevertheless of identical social composition; so that there was often an official, but never a caste, ascendancy.  From very early times there was occasional friction between the Home Government, represented by the Governors, and the colonial democracies, over such matters as taxation, official salaries, quartering of troops, and navigation laws.  Writs of quo warranto were issued against Connecticut, Carolina, New York, and Maryland, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the Charter of Massachusetts, after long wrangles with the Crown, was forfeited in 1684, and not restored until 1692, after a period of despotic government under Sir Edmund Andros.  But for a century or more the system worked well enough upon the whole.  Under the powerful lever of the representative Assembly, neutralized by the ever-present need for military protection from the Mother Country, and with the wholesome check to undue coercion set by the broad Atlantic, civic freedom grew and flourished to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world.