permission to Ireland to make what she liked and send it where she liked; but it was a small gain without some means of finding out what Ireland really liked, and translating that will, without external pressure, into law.  The Parliament was neither an organ of public opinion nor a free agent.  It was even more corrupt and less representative than before.  It was as completely under the control of the English Government as before.  The modern conception of a Colonial Ministry serving under a constitutional Governor selected by the Crown, but acting with the advice of his Ministry, was unknown.  The English Government, through its Lord-Lieutenant, still appointed English Ministers in Ireland, and in the hands of these Ministers lay not only that large portion of the national income known as the hereditary revenue, but the whole machinery of patronage and corruption.  Even the legislative independence was unreal; for majorities still had to be bought, Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is, English ministerial assent; so that powerful English pressure could be, and was, brought to bear upon their policy and construction.  And the worst of it was that English pressure here and elsewhere meant then what it meant in the next century, and what it too often means now, English party pressure exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve sectional English ends.  In short, Ireland, so far from being a nation, was still virtually a Colony, subjected to the worst conceivable form of colonial Government, groaning under economic evils unknown in the least fortunate of the Colonies, and without the numerous mitigating circumstances and the hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the seat of Empire.  On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all, nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages were about to culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, complicated immensely the problem of regeneration in Ireland.

What was the remedy?  Parliamentary reform.  The Volunteers saw this instantly.  Parliament itself scouted the idea of reform, because it threatened the Protestant ascendancy.  Any weakening of the Protestant ascendancy was unthinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in 1778 had coined the grandiose phrase that “the Irish Protestant could never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave,” and who afterwards explained what he meant by saying that the liberty of the Catholic was to be only such as was “entirely consistent with the Protestant ascendancy,” and that “the Protestant interest was his first object.”  Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland was fundamental.  What was its corollary?  Dependence on England.  Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, or, as in Ireland, on both, cannot last in any white community without external support, and the external support for ascendancy in Ireland was English force without and English bribes