There are very few critical dates in Irish history, and of those few the night of November 29, 1783, was the most critical of all.  It marked the climax of a brief and bright renaissance from the long stagnation of the eighteenth, and heralded a decline into the long agony of the nineteenth century, a decline concealed by the fictitious lustre which still hangs over the first decade of Grattan’s unreformed Parliament, but none the less already present.  The Volunteers, their grand opportunity lost, slowly broke up.  Should they have used force, even under the threat of Burgoyne’s guns?  It would have been infinitely better both for England and Ireland if they had.  Nothing but force could avail.  Never would force have been better justified, for the very soul of a people “rang zwischen Tod und Leben.”

It is hard, nevertheless, to blame the Volunteers for not appreciating the full magnitude of the crisis and acting accordingly.  They were ahead of their time as it was in the political instinct which taught them the vital importance of a reformed Parliament.  They were far ahead of England, where the younger Pitt had failed to carry Reform a few months before, and was to fail again two years later when he urged reform for Ireland.  They were even ahead of their time in religious tolerance—­witness the Gordon riots in London two years before.  Their Parliament wore the crown and spoke the regal language of a patriot Assembly.  For five years they themselves had glorified justifiably in the perfect discipline and sobriety with which they had used their irregular power.  Their most trusted leaders suggested that they would yet achieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which, although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps an actual collision with Royal troops.  One of the last acts of the Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that “their humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the cordial union of the two kingdoms.”  This document might have been copied mutatis mutandis from the American petitions prior to the war, and was to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did actually lead to armed rebellion.  It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky