ruling caste with an eye to the commercial interests of Great Britain in
so far as its competition was injurious. Religious persecution, aiming
frankly at proselytism, and restrictions imposed so as to choke every
industry which in any way hit English manufactures were the keynotes of
the whole policy, and in the pages of Edmund Burke one may find a more
searching indictment of English rule in Ireland in the eighteenth
century than any which has since been drawn up.

The concession of Parliamentary independence in 1782 was, as the whole
world knows, yielded as a counsel of prudence in the panic fright
resulting from the American war and the French revolution. Under
Grattan's Parliament the country began to enjoy a degree of prosperity
such as she had never known before, and the destruction of that
Parliament was effected, as Castlereagh, the Chief Secretary, himself
expressed it, by "buying up the fee-simple of Irish corruption"; in
other words, by the creation of twenty-six peerages and the expenditure
of one and a half million in bribing borough-mongers.

In very truth, the Act of Union was one which, by uniting the
legislatures, divided the peoples; and it has been pointed out as
significant that when the legislatures of England and Scotland were
amalgamated a common name was found for the whole island, but that no
such name has been adopted for the three kingdoms which were united in
1800.

The new epoch began in such a way as might have been expected from its
conception. The bigotry of George III., undismayed by what he used to
call Pitt's "damned long obstinate face," delayed for more than a
quarter of a century the grant of Emancipation to the Catholics, by
promises of which a certain amount of their hostility had been disarmed.