that Parliament was rotten, and that Ireland’s future depended on its reform.  Numbering some 80,000 or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament.  Parliament at once stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the “Pretorian bands.”  “And now,” said Grattan in his magnificent way, “having given a Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majestically a great work.”

But the work was not begun.  Parliament was the enemy of the people, and the Volunteers knew it.  Now, what was the “people” in the minds of the Volunteers?  Undoubtedly they did not, after a century of racial ascendancy, perform the miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the principle of absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant alike.  Such mental revulsions rarely occur among men, and when they do occur are apt to produce reactionary cataclysms.  But they did from the first give a real meaning to Grattan’s vague rhetoric about Catholic slaves; from the first they made overtures towards the Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic franchise as a part of their scheme of reform ten years before that enfranchisement, without Parliamentary reform and therefore valueless, became a practical issue.  For the present these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand of the Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin in November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction of Parliament on a democratic Protestant basis.  The Catholic franchise had been strongly supported, but by the influence of Charlemont and Flood rejected.  It is, of course, easy to maintain in theory that a democratic Protestant ascendancy so designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom as an aristocratic and corrupt ascendancy; but nobody with faith in human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm that the process of reform would have ended with the enactment of the Volunteer Bill.  No present-day Protestant Ulsterman should entertain such a dishonouring doubt.  Mercifully, men are so made that, if left to themselves, they go forward, not backward.  A pure Assembly, formed on the Volunteer plan, stimulated by the enlightened conscience which such an Assembly invariably develops, by the discovery of the fundamental identity of interests between the great bulk of Catholics and Protestants, and by the manly instinct of self-preservation against undue English encroachment, would have moved rapidly towards tolerance and equality.