The scruples of George III., who although as King of Ireland he yielded
to the claims of Catholics to the suffrage by giving the Royal consent
to the enfranchising Act of Grattan's Parliament in 1793, were such that
they made him declare that his coronation oath compelled him to maintain
the Protestantism of the United Parliament of the three kingdoms and
express himself to Dundas of opinion that Pitt's emancipation proposals
were "the most Jacobinical thing ever seen."

The continuance for thirty years of these political disabilities, and
the obligation incumbent on Catholics to support an alien Church with
the full weight of endowments and tithes, did more than anything else to
maintain the wall of prejudice between the two creeds which the eighteen
years of Grattan's Parliament had done much to destroy.

It was James Anthony Froude who said that the absenteeism of her men of
genius was a worse wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her
landlords. This evil the Union accentuated by reducing Dublin from the
seat of Government, which in the middle of the eighteenth century had
been the second only to London in size and importance, to the status of
a provincial city from which were drawn the leaders of that liberal
school of Protestantism the rise of which was the marked feature of
Irish politics at the end of the eighteenth century.

The dividing line between parties in England has never been one of caste
or of creed, still less of both combined. In the past the Whigs could
claim as aristocratic and as exclusive a prestige as could the Tories.
In point of wealth there was little to choose, and, most important of
all, in respect of religion, though the minor clergy were very largely
Tory and the Dissenters were allied to the Whigs, yet the Anglicanism of
the great Whig families, and their appointments when in power to the