sympathy of the Presbyterians for America had awakened a vehemently republican spirit, and the rising tide of revolution in France, found a loudly reverberating echo in Ireland, especially amongst the younger men.  In 1791 in Belfast, the well-known “Society of United Irishmen” came into existence and its leaders were eager to combine this democratic movement in the north with the recently reconstructed Roman Catholic committee in Dublin.  All these, it is plain, were elements of danger which required careful watching.  The one hope, the one necessity, as all who were not blinded by passion or prejudice saw plainly, lay in a reformed Parliament—­one which would represent, no longer a section, but the whole community.  To combine to procure this, and to sink all religious differences in the common weal, was the earnest desire of all who genuinely cared for their country, whether within or without the Parliament.  Of this programme, the members even of the United Irishmen were, in the first instance, ardent exponents, and their demands, ostensibly at least, extended no further.  In the words of the oath administered to new members, they desired to forward “an identity of interests, a communion of rights, and a union amongst Irishmen of all religious persuasions, without which every reform in Parliament must be partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the wishes, and insufficient for the freedom and happiness of the country.”

LII.

THE FITZWILLIAM DISAPPOINTMENT.

The eagerness shown at this time by the principal Irish Protestants to give full emancipation to their Roman Catholic countrymen is eminently creditable to them, and stands in strong relief to the bitterness on both sides, both in earlier and latter times.  By 1792 there seems to have been something almost like unanimity on the subject.  What reads strangest perhaps to our ears, 600 Belfast Protestant householders warmly pressed the motion on the Government.  In a work, published six years earlier, Lord Sheffield, though himself opposed to emancipation, puts this unanimity in unmistakable words.  “It is curious,” he says, “to observe one-fifth or one-sixth of a nation in possession of all the power and property of the country, eager to communicate that power to the remaining four-fifths, which would, in effect, entirely transfer it from themselves.”

[Illustration:  ("A man of importance.”) THE EARL OF MOIRA. By Gillray.]

The generation to which Flood, Lucas, and Lord Charlemont had belonged, and who were almost to a man opposed to emancipation, was fast passing away, and amongst the more independent men of the younger generation there were few who had not been won over to Grattan’s view of the matter.  In England, too, circumstances were beginning to push many, even of those hitherto bitterly hostile to concession, in the same direction.  The growing terror of the French Revolution had loosened