VII. 1786. January. BOOK although conciliation had failed a thousand times it might succeed on the thousand and first. Rutland agreed that if they desired 'to avoid measures calculated to stir political passions' they must leave the Volunteers alone; the ugly feature in the leaving them alone, however, being that when a corps dissolved the arms were not given up, but remained in the hands of the rabble of the country." 1 Parliament opened calmly, as if alive to the seriousness of the situation, and addressed itself to the duties which were waiting for it. Flood was in England. Many of the Opposition members had remained in the country, expecting that the session would be unpropitious to them. Party politics being for the moment at rest, the attention of the House of Commons was drawn naturally to the va rious forms in which anarchy was showing itself. Roderick O'Connor must be taken in hand, or the example would spread. Mr. Ogle, of Wexford, enquired why the Gazette was full every day of accounts of ravished women? The Grand Jury of Dublin petitioned againft the multitudes of whiskey shops, 'hellish dens' where the artisans were driven to mad ness. Lord Luttrell said it was an insult to the understanding to talk of industry to a nation which had been drunk for a hundred years. Monk Mason enquired how gentlemen intended to stop drinking, when twelve or fifteen hundred private stills were at full work, protected and encouraged by the landlords on their own properties? The blame was thrown of course on the Government. Fitzgibbon, speaking the truth always, however 1 The Duke of Rutland to Lord Sydney, January 29. Secret.' เ CHAP. II. 1786. unpalatable it might be, told the House that the disorders of Ireland were traceable, not to Government, but to the supineness of the country gentle- February. men. Government ought never to interfere save when the ordinary means of keeping the peace had been tried and found ineffectual. The Irish gentry, when any act of violence occurred, folded their hands and applied to the Castle for a guard of soldiers.' These preliminary debates were comparatively rational. The Duke congratulated himself on the recovered sanity of a now thoughtful and prudent Legislature. Scarce a troubled wave,' he said, 'appeared on the political surface.' 1 The Duke was prematurely sanguine. The state of the South required remedies more active than words. The Catholic bands having disarmed the Protestants, were grown so daring as to attack the soldiers. A party of the 20th Infantry, who were conducting a convoy of stores into Cork, were surprised on the road by a party of Whiteboys. They drove the assailants off at last, but only after a sharp skirmish. The obvious and immediately necessary remedy was to hunt down and disarm these dangerous ruffians, but the magic shield of the defenders of Irish liberty was extended even over the Whiteboys. The Catholics being in possession of arms,' the Duke said, 'was a principle which struck at the vitals of the State. Yet every combination of men with arms was so entangled with the Volunteer system that to interfere anywhere directly and avowedly raised a stir in the entire body.' If Ireland was not to relapse into the anarchy of the sixteenth century, a police of some kind was 1 'Duke of Rutland to Lord Sydney, February 27. Secret.' BOOK imperatively necessary, but a police in the imagination of the patriots was only a militia in disguise. VII. 1786. February. Fitzgibbon had given notice of his intention to introduce a Bill for the purpose. The patriots determined to oppose it; and to give time for their scattered forces to rally, Mr. Forbes,1 in Flood's absence, brought on a preliminary skirmish on the old griev ance of the Pension List. A scandal the Pension List had always been. Under the new Constitution corruption had increased, for the Lords and Commons had larger powers of giving trouble. This only was to be said in defence of so large a misappropriation of the Irish revenue, that to the general expenses of the empire Ireland contributed nothing. She had refused passionately to pay what she called tribute to the navy which protected her commerce. List she was receiving, as a bribe to herself, a portion of what ought to have been employed for more honourable purposes, to prevent her Constitution from becoming such a nuisance that at all risks it must have been broken into pieces.2 The principle was less at fault than the application. If some pensions might be applied with a show of reason to silence parties in the Irish House of Commons, there were others which were still given as the reward of services which would not bear publicity. The entire Irish list amounted now to a hundred thousand pounds a year, and as Curran said 1 Member for Ratoath, in Meath. 2 Arthur Young has some judicious remarks on the Pension List. Lord Shelburne, he says, once suggested to him that Ireland might make a good bargain for herself if she would consent to pay 700,0007. a In the Pension year into the Imperial treasury, as a final composition for the Pension List and the cost of her military establishment. But any such arrangement would have made her tributary. 'This polyglot of wealth, this museum of curiosities, the Pension List, embraces every link in the human chain, every description of men, women, and children, from the exalted excellence of a Hawke or a Rodney to the debased situation of the lady that humbleth herself that she may be exalted.' Such a blot on the escutcheon was an easy target for patriotic oratory. Mr. Forbes complained that the Irish pensions now exceeded the English. They were granted to overturn the independence of Parliament. Men were but men, and while ministers bribed, members of Parliament would be bribed. Grattan wound up a passionate speech by saying 'that if he should affirm that the Pension List was not a grievance, he would affirm in the face of his country an impudent, insolent, and public lie.' It occurred neither to Forbes nor Grattan that the real mischief lay in conferring free institutions on a people who were confessedly liable to corrupt influences, and that if the members of the Irish Parliament had not been bribed by the ministers, they would have sold their votes to parties or purposes in methods more injurious to the State. Scorning alike the bait which governed the movements of Irish politicians and the politicians themselves who railed at the system till their own turn came to be fed, Fitzgibbon flung the baseness which made corruption necessary in the teeth of those who were clamouring at it. 'Let me,' he said, 'ask gentlemen who exclaim so loudly against pensions, is there no man among them who has ever thought his own. services deserving a pension? No. Not one. Is there no man who would accept a pension? No. Not CHAP. II. 1786. March. BOOK one. VII. 1786. March. Was there a man of the 1101 who would accept a pension? No. Not one. When that Bill which threatened us with wealth and commerce was introduced was there a man of the said 110 that offered to desert for a pension? No. Not one. Is there now a person among them that would come. over and vote with us for a pension? Not one, I am certain. And therefore when gentlemen speak against the folly and wickedness of bestowing pensions on members of Parliament, I am convinced they speak the genuine sentiments of their minds.' 2 72 The Attorney-General's language, however sarcastically true, was not conciliatory. Forbes pressed his division, and though he was beaten, the large numbers who voted on both sides showed that the patriots had by this time rallied to their posts. 3 The vital question of the Police Bill now came on to try many things; among them to try Mr. Grattan's title to the name of a statesman. The Bill in itself was a small matter. If successful, the design was to extend its provisions, but for the present it applied only to Dublin, where the House of Commons had been half a dozen times invaded by the mob; where a tarring and feathering committee had maintained a reign of terror of six months; where the newspapers openly preached assassination, and where an Act of Parliament had been necessary to prevent enthusiastic patriots from slicing the tendons of British soldiers straying in the streets. In Dublin, if nowhere else, Parliament might be expected to agree to the necessity of a more efficient protection of the 1 The minority which voted against the commercial propositions. 2 Irish Debates, March 13, 1786. 3 134 to 78. |