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Is Ulster Right

28 of 95

Thus Ireland became a nation in a sense she had never been before. The only tie to any power beyond sea was that the King of England was also King of Ireland; Ireland could legislate for itself, and enter into commercial treaties with foreign powers; but, on the other hand, it had to pay its own debts and provide its own army and navy. As Grattan was not merely the most prominent politician of the period, but also the leader of the now triumphant "National" party, we may fairly take the views expressed by him as representative of those of the party that followed him. A study of his speeches and letters will show how utterly different were the ideas and aims of the National party of 1782 from those of the Nationalists of to-day. In the first place, Grattan was intensely loyal; that is to say, it never occurred to him that Ireland could ever wish to be independent in the sense of not being subject to the King of England, or could seek to be united to any other power. Secondly, he was intensely aristocratic. His idea was that Government should and would always be in the hands of the propertied and educated classes; that Parliament should consist of country gentlemen and professional men from the towns, elected on a narrow franchise. (It must be remembered that the country gentlemen had recently given evidence of their patriotic zeal by the inauguration of the Volunteer movement; and the ability and eloquence of the Irish Bar at that period is proverbial). Thirdly, he regarded Protestant ascendancy as a fundamental necessity. It is true that other politicians at the time saw that they were faced with a serious difficulty: the very principles to which they had appealed and by virtue of which they had obtained their legislative independence made it illogical that three-fourths of the community should be unrepresented; whereas if votes were given to the Roman Catholic majority it was inevitable that they would soon become eligible for seats in the Legislature; and if so, the Protestant minority must be swamped, and the country ruled by a very different class and according to very different ideas from those which prevailed in the Parliament of which Grattan was a member. And would a Roman Catholic Parliament and nation care to remain subject to a King of England whose title depended on his being a Protestant? Grattan, however, swept all such considerations aside with an easy carelessness. He believed that under the influences of perfect toleration large numbers of Roman Catholics would conform; and the remainder, quite satisfied with their position, would never dream of attacking the Church or any other existing institution. We may smile at his strange delusions as to the future; but he was probably not more incorrect than many people are to-day in their conjectures as to what the world will be like a hundred years hence; and if we try to place ourselves in Grattan's position, there is something to be said for his conjectures. At that time the influence of the Church of Rome was at its lowest; Spain had almost ceased to exist as a European power; and in France the state of religious thought was very different from what it had been in the days of Louis XIV. Irish Roman Catholic gentlemen who sent their sons to be educated in France found that they came back Voltaireans; even the young men who went to study for the priesthood in French seminaries became embued with liberalism to an extent that would make a modern Ultramontane shudder. Then in Ireland all local power was in the hands of the landlords; the Roman Catholic bishops possessed hardly any political influence. It would have required more keenness than a mere enthusiast like Grattan possessed to foresee that the time would come when all this would be absolutely reversed. What was there in the eighteenth century to lead him to surmise that in the twentieth the landlords would be ruined and gone, and that local government would have become vested in District Councils in which Protestants would have no power, but over which the authority of the bishops would be absolute? So Grattan and his party entered on the new conditions of political life with airy optimism. But there were, both in England and France,

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