[12] Lecky, “History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century,” vol. ii., pp. 124-126.

[13] Trevelyan, “The American Revolution,” vol. i., p. 16.

[14] See “The Irish Race in America,” by Captain Ed. O’Meagher Condore.

[15] “History of the British Army,” vol. iii.

CHAPTER III

GRATTAN’S PARLIAMENT

We left Ireland in 1782 apparently in possession of a triumph as great as that of America, though won without bloodshed and without the least tincture of sedition; for the Volunteers of 1782 were as loyal to the Crown as the most ardent American royalists.  In the light of political ideas developed at a much later period, we know that the American Colonies might have remained within the Empire, even if their utmost claims had been granted.  Had the idea of responsible government been understood, it would have been realized that their exclusive control of taxation and legislation was not inconsistent with Imperial Union, but essential to it.  Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America.  The facts of ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized.  Ireland and England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister nations, with the old irritating servitude swept away, and the bonds of natural affection and natural interest substituted.  That the close proximity of the two nations, however marked the contrast between their natural characteristics, made these bonds far more necessary and valuable than in the case of America, stood to reason, and, again, the fact was recognized in Anglo-Irish relations.  America had fought rather than submit to a forced contribution to Imperial funds.  Nobody in Ireland, in or out of Parliament, had ever objected in principle to an indirect voluntary contribution in troops, and now that the American War was ended, non-Parliamentary objections to one particular application of the principle had no further substance.  Nor, as was shortly to be shown in the reception given in Ireland to Pitt’s abortive Commercial Propositions of 1785, was there any objection to a direct contribution in money on a fixed annual scale in return for a mutual free trade.[16] The sun had surely risen over a free yet loyal Ireland.

Never was there a more complete delusion.  It would have been far better for Ireland if she had never had a Parliament at all, but had had to seek her own salvation in the healthy rough-and-tumble of domestic revolution.  The mere name of “Parliament” seems perpetually to have hypnotized even its best members, and the illusion was at its highest now.  Nothing essential had been changed.  Commercial freedom was the most real gain, because it involved the definite repeal of certain trade-laws and the