for gaining control of finance and for obtaining domestic reform.  An Octennial Act, passed in 1768, went a little way towards transforming Parliament from a permanent privileged Committee, under the control of the Executive, into the semblance at least of a free Assembly, and the first dissolution under this Act, in 1776, produced the famous Parliament which, though elected on the same narrow and corrupt basis as before, in the space of six years first admitted the principle of toleration for all creeds, and wrested from English hands commercial and legislative autonomy.  It came too late to avert—­if, indeed, it could ever have averted—­the implication of Ireland in the American War, its predecessor of 1775 having, in defiance of Irish opinion, subscribed an Address to the Crown, expressing “abhorrence” of the American revolt and “inviolable attachment to the just rights” of the King’s Government, and having obediently voted four thousand Irish troops for the war.

Nor, for all the impassioned eloquence of Grattan and Hussey Burgh, did the real driving-power of the new Parliament come from within its own ranks, but from the unrepresented multitude outside.  A clause removing the test from Dissenters was struck out of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, mainly owing to dictation from England, but partly from resentment against Presbyterian sympathy with the American cause.  It was only in 1780, when the Presbyterians were enrolled in that formidable revolutionary organization known as the Volunteers, that a test which had excluded them from all share in the government of their adopted country for seventy-four years was repealed.  As for the Catholics, the small measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition anywhere.  Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against worship and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and the sheer impossibility of enforcement.  The religion, naturally, had thriven under persecution, so that in spite of the Code’s manifold temptations to recant, only four thousand converts had been registered in the last fifty years.  The laws designed to safeguard the wholesale confiscations of the previous century had long ago achieved their purpose, and men were beginning to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the great mass of the people poor and ignorant.  The real spirit of toleration shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of which enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, was small enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics for generations past, the absence of all tendency in them towards counter-persecution, or even towards intolerance of Protestantism in any of its forms, Quaker, Huguenot, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of their own overwhelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the tithes.  Politically they were a source of great strength to the Government.  When the Presbyterians condemned the American War, the Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in favour of it as warmly as the tame majority in Parliament.