III. Conspiracy Bill Debate on the state of Munster Measures for the preservation of peace Speech of Fitzgibbon on the Regency question Address of the Irish Houses to the Prince of Wales. Second speech of Fitzgibbon VI. The Round Robin THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. BOOK V. CHAPTER I. THE REVIVAL OF THE CELTS. SECTION I. A FREE government depends for its successful working on the loyal coöperation of the people. Where the people do not coöperate, the forms of liberty are either a mockery, or an instrument of disunion and anarchy. Had the Irish been regarded from the outset as a conquered people whom a stronger neighbor had forced, for its own convenience, into reluctant submission, Ireland would have escaped the worst of her calamities. Her clans would have been held in awe by an army; public order would have been preserved by a police: but her lands would have been left to their native owners; her customs and her laws might have been untouched, and her religion need not have been interfered with. The nature of the English constitution forbade an experiment which might have been dangerous to our own liberties. Ireland was in fact a foreign country; we preferred to assume that she was an integral part of the empire. We imposed upon her our own modes of self-government; we gave her a parliament, we gave her our trial by jury and our common law; we assimilated the Irish Church to our own; and these magnificent institutions refused to root themselves in an uncongenial soil. The Parliament was forbidden to legislate till its decisions had been shaped for it beforehand. The rule of feudal tenure inflicted forfeiture on rebellion; the native owners were therefore dispossessed for asserting the liberties of their country; and their estates were bestowed upon aliens. The Irish preferred their own laws to ours. They became in consequence "Irish enemies and outlaws, and might be wronged and killed with impunity. When we forced them at last to submit to our laws, trial by jury made the execution of them impossible; and with equal impunity the colonists could then be murdered, their cattle houghed, and their daughters ravished by the natives. The Church being an estate of the realm and a governing section of the constitution, the Church in the two countries had to be shaped on the same pattern. At the conquest we forced the Irish Church into submission to the Papacy. At the Reformation we forced it to apostatize. As the Reformation pursued its course, the theory of our Church Establishment split the garrison of Protestants, whom we had planted in the island, into hostile camps. A free representative legislature which yet was not free and was not representative-a gentry who could not rule a Church which could not teach - laws which could not be enforced these were the consequences which resulted from the preference of unreality to fact. They might all have been avoided had the truth been acknowledged and acted on; but England was unable to recognize that constitutional liberty in our country might be constitutional slavery in another. If the object was to absorb and extinguish the spirit of Irish nationality, it singularly failed of attainment. Had the union been conceded for which the presentiments of the Irish Parliament led them to petition in 1704; had trade and manufactures been allowed to develop, and the stream of British Protestant emigration been directed continuously into all parts of the island, the native population might have been overborne or driven out, and the mother country might have retained the affections of a people with whom she would then have been identified in interest and sentiment. By a contemptible jealousy she flung them back upon themselves, a minority amidst a hostile population, and condemned them to idleness and impoverishment; she left them to add their own grievances to the accumulated wrongs of the entire country; while she left them at the same time their own Parliament, in which the national discontent could find a voice; and taught them to look for allies among her own enemies. The Protestant revolt will form the subject of the present volume. It was an act of madness madness in the colony which revolted madness in the mother country which provoked the quarrel. The colonists were an army of occupation amidst a spoliated nation who were sullenly brooding over their wrongs. By England's help alone they could hope to retain their ascendency. It was England's highest interest to keep the garrison strong, if she was to es |