ts lowest; Spain had almost
ceased to exist as a European power; and in France the state of
religious thought was very different from what it had been in the days
of Louis XIV. Irish Roman Catholic gentlemen who sent their sons to
be educated in France found that they came back Voltaireans; even the
young men who went to study for the priesthood in French seminaries
became embued with liberalism to an extent that would make a modern
Ultramontane shudder. Then in Ireland all local power was in the hands
of the landlords; the Roman Catholic bishops possessed hardly any
political influence. It would have required more keenness than a mere
enthusiast like Grattan possessed to foresee that the time would come
when all this would be absolutely reversed. What was there in the
eighteenth century to lead him to surmise that in the twentieth the
landlords would be ruined and gone, and that local government would
have become vested in District Councils in which Protestants would
have no power, but over which the authority of the bishops would be
absolute?

So Grattan and his party entered on the new conditions of political
life with airy optimism. But there were, both in England and France,
shrewder and more far-seeing men than he, who realised from the first
that the new state of affairs could not possibly be a lasting one, but
must lead either to union or complete separation. Of course so long
as all parties happened to be of the same mind, no difficulties
would arise; but it was merely a question of time when some cause
of friction would occur, and then the inherent weakness of the
arrangement would be apparent. A moment's thought will show that
for Ireland to be subject to the English King but independent of the
English Parliament was a physical impossibility. The king would act
on the advice of his ministers who were responsible to the English
Parliament; either the Irish Parliament must obey, or a deadlock would
ensue. Then, suppose that England were to become engaged in a war of
which the people of Ireland disapproved, Ireland might not only
refuse to make any voluntary grant in aid, but even declare her
ports neutral, withdraw her troops, and pass a vote of censure on the
English Government. Again, with regard to trade; Ireland might adopt a
policy of protection against England, and enter into a treaty for free
trade with some foreign country which might be at the moment England's
deadliest rival. The confusion that might