But the Assembly which might have saved Ireland never came into being.  The Volunteers were in weak and incompetent hands.  The metamorphosis they had undergone from a body formed for home defence into a militant political organization found them at the critical moment unprovided with the right stamp of leader.  Flood, who helped to draft their Bill, was a brilliant but unscrupulous and discredited Parliamentarian, and a fanatical advocate of an unimpaired Protestant ascendancy.  Lord Charlemont, one of the most influential founders of the movement, and a man of the highest integrity, was lukewarm for reform, an aristocrat and an ascendancy man to the finger-tips, dreading the mysterious forces he had helped to call into being, and desirous to keep them, as he said, “respectable.”  Was it respectable for armed men to dictate to a Parliament, however just their cause?  As often happens in the ferment of popular movements, the one leader who spoke undiluted truth and sense spoke it in florid and unmeasured language and was himself of a figure and behaviour little likely to inspire permanent confidence.  This was the famous Bishop of Derry, called by Charlemont a blasphemous Deist, by Wesley an exemplary Divine, by Fox a dishonest madman, and by Jeremy Bentham “a most excellent companion, pleasant, intelligent, well-bred, and liberal-minded to the last degree.”  He was certainly vain and ostentatious, certainly a democratic free-thinker, but a full knowledge of his character is not of much concern to us.  The point is that he was right about Ireland’s needs, though the wrong man at the moment to drive home her claims.  Many finer agitators than he have failed in causes just as good.  Many without half his merits have succeeded.  We shall find his Canadian counterparts later in the figures of Mackenzie and Papineau.

The crisis came on November 29, 1783, when the Reform Bill reached Parliament, and was introduced by Flood, wearing the Volunteer dress.  It was rejected on the first vote.  No doubt the circumstances were humiliating, and if there had been any serious inclination in Parliament towards self-reform and the relinquishment of an odious and mischievous monopoly, we should freely forgive rejection.  But there was little or none, as after-events proved, and the real humiliation lay, not in the dictation of the Irish Volunteers, but in the fact that the Volunteers themselves were overawed by a strong body of British regular troops, mustered for the occasion under General Burgoyne.  The vicious circle was complete.  Forced to choose between reform and dependence on England, Parliament chose the latter.  And only a year and a half before Grattan had dazzled his hears with the words:  “Ireland is now a nation ... esto perpetua.”