within.  There was the chain of causation, the vicious circle rather; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought he had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences which were throttling her.  He could not see that the more he wrestled for the independence of a sham Parliament, while resisting its transformation into a real Parliament, the more he strengthened those influences, because he inevitably widened the gulf between Parliament and the Irish people.  The glamour his brilliant gifts had thrown over the Irish Parliament only served to divert his own mind and the minds of other talented and high-minded men from the seat of disease in Ireland.  Time and talent were wasted from the first over points of pride, trivialities which seemed portentous to over-sensitive minds; metaphysical puzzles as to the exact nature of the relations now existing between Ireland and England; whether the repeal of the Poynings’ Act and the Declaratory Act were sufficient guarantees of freedom; whether Ireland herself should nominate a Regent or accept the nomination from England.  Meanwhile, the sands were running out, and Ireland was a slave to a minute but powerful minority of her sons and, only through them, to England.

Yet the heart of Ireland was sound.  All the materials for regeneration were there.  The Catholics, whom by an old inherited instinct Grattan professed to dread, were the most Conservative part of the population, so Conservative as to be unaware of the source of their miseries, without the smallest leaning towards a counter-ascendancy, and without a notion of sedition or rebellion.  Paradox as it seems, if they leaned in any political direction, it was dimly towards the constituted authority of the day, the Irish Parliament.  But the truth is that they were without political consciousness, behind the times, unappreciative of the new forces operating round them.  In sore need of courageous and enlightened guidance from men of their own faith, they were almost leaderless.  The leeway to be made up after the destructive action of the penal laws was so enormous that Catholic philanthropists had no time or will for high politics, and devoted their whole energy to the further relaxation of those laws, to the education of their backward co-religionists, and to the mitigation of poverty.  For relief they instinctively looked towards the only legal source of relief, though the source of secular oppression, Parliament.  But this was habit.  The Catholics at this time were like clay in the hands of the potter, open to any curative and ennobling impulse.  That impulse came, as was right and natural, from the Protestant side.  The only healthy political organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North, with their headquarters at Belfast.  They represented all that was best in the Protestant population.  They had won the practical victory, such as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular victory.  They grasped the essential truth