dissolution, made another attempt to bring it about. The heads of the Judges' Tenure Bill were brought to the Viceroy to be sent over. Lord Harcourt, unwilling in his embarrassment to part with any influence by which he could work on the fears or hopes of the baser members of the Lower House, himself entreated the Cabinet to refuse consent.

"The state of the country duly considered," he said, "I am persuaded it would be very undesirable to make the commission of judges to continue during good behavior. So many inconveniences would infallibly result from such a bill, that I trust it will not be deemed proper to return it to Ireland." 1

These proceedings may be described as a very effective sowing the wind, the more so as the parties concerned were innocently unconscious of what they were doing. On the 5th of April the session closed, and with it the Parliament. "Our business ended," De Blaquiere reported, "with temper and satisfaction. We had a sharp debate on the address. Mr. Grattan, Mr. Bushe, and Mr. Yelverton were particularly violent; but we shamed them even in argument, and in point of numbers were so strong that they dared not divide.” 2

It would be curious to know what the " arguments" were. A case could be made on the Money Bill, on Irish rights, and the American war; but the attack turned largely on the defences of the country, the increasing debt, the corrupt expenditure, the mon

1 "Lord Harcourt to Lord Weymouth, February 5, 1776." The Harcourt correspondence in the State Paper Office is preserved in copies made and annotated by Sir John Blaquiere. To the present production of his chief he appends as a remark: "I was in the country when this extraordinary letter was written. J. B."

2" To Lord North, April 7."

strous Pension List, and the loading the Establishment with sinecures as the price of political support. On these points what answers could have been made which were not lies?

Harcourt's term of office was now running out. One duty only remained to him to superintend the general election; to see the new Parliament installed, and its composition tested by the election of a Speaker. It was then to be prorogued for fifteen months. The Viceroy was to go to England. His successor was not yet determined on. He might himself, perhaps, be asked to return, and if Lord North so wished it he was ready to sacrifice himself, or, as he put it, “he was not disposed to turn his face from the evil, or suffer the bitter cup to pass from his lips."

De Blaquiere had already explained the steps which the election rendered necessary. The estimate fell far short of the requirements. Eighteen members of the Lower House insisted that they had earned peerages. If they received their coronets, they undertook to fill the seats which they had vacated with men on whom the Castle might rely. But they refused to be paid in promises. They must have their price on the spot. Besides these, De Blaquiere recommended a long list of persons for pensions and places. He represented compliance as "indispensable for the public service." And here again delay was unpermitted, for, as he observed, "Many of our grants are always mortgaged in part for the purchase-money of our seats." 1 "I have but three words for you," he wrote in a companion note to Secretary Robinson-"Dispatch, dispatch, dispatch, 1 "Sir John Blaquiere to Lord North, May 4."

for the existence of your future views depends upon

it."

Under these influences the memorable Parliament was chosen which was to revolutionize the Irish Constitution. Little could its future career have been conjectured from its first performance. It assembled in force to choose its Speaker. Pery, as before, was the Government candidate. Ponsonby was again the choice of the patriots. It appeared, when the trial came, that Lord Shannon and the Elies had fallen off again. The Duke of Leinster had forgotten the old feud, and supported Ponsonby with all his weight. But corruption for the present proved too strong for aristocracy and patriotism combined. Pery was elected by 141 votes to 98, and the Castle won a glorious victory in its own imagination.

Public confidence, which had been shaken, was restored. Government debentures rose from 90 to 101. Lord Harcourt not being required to drink any deeper of his "bitter cup," resigned with an aureole about his head, and returned to England, to fall into the Nuneham well. De Blaquiere, who resigned with him, preferred to remain in a country where his composure under fire had made him popular, and where he conceived that by his political dexterity he had fixed the authority of Government on a basis of rock.

"In retiring from my public station in this kingdom," he wrote to Lord North, "permit me most sincerely to congratulate your lordship on the unshaken loyalty and perfect tranquillity that have been preserved in it at a period when so much pains had been taken to lessen the one and disturb the other. I mention the situation of this kingdom with so much

confidence and pleasure because there is not a part of his majesty's dominions where I would be so happy to spend the remainder of a private life as in Ireland."

"1

1 "Sir John Blaquiere to Lord North, July 4, 1776."

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNINGS OF RETRIBUTION.

SECTION I.

NINETY YEARS had passed since Aghrim and the surrender of Limerick had laid the Irish race once more prostrate at the feet of England. The time had come, as it comes with all nations and with all men, when England was to be called to account for the trust which had been committed to her. She had sown with poison weeds the draggled island which lay in the rear of her imperial domain. The crop had sprung up and ripened, and now the harvest was to be gathered. When circumstances compel a strong nation to deprive a neighbor of political independence that nation is bound to confer on the inferior country the only reparation in its power-to share with it to the utmost its own material advantagesto justify its assumption of superiority by the equity and wisdom of its administration. England had discharged her sovereign duties to Ireland by leaving her to anarchy masked behind a caricature of the forms of her own constitution. With an insolent mockery she had refused her request for incor