axation, nor one hour's security against the renewal exterminating
civil war. Session after session have you been compelled to enact
laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible
excesses of the mass of your people: and the fury of murder and
pillage and desolation have so outrun all legislative exertions
that you have been at length driven to the hard necessity of
breaking down the pale of municipal law, and putting your courage
under the ban of military government--and in every little circle of
dignity and independence we hear whispers of discontent at the
temperate discretion with which it is administered.... Look to your
civil and religious dissensions. Look to the fury of political
faction and the torrents of human blood that stain the face of your
country, and of what materials is that man composed who will not
listen with patience and good will to any proposition that can be
made to him for composing the distractions and healing the wounds
and alleviating the miseries of this devoted nation?"

Lord Clare's words--unanswered and unanswerable then and now--constitute
a sufficient comment on the foolish fable of later invention, that
Ireland was a land of peace and harmony, of orderly government and
abounding prosperity, when a wicked English minister came and "stole
away the Parliament House"--since which all has been decay and
desolation. The halcyon period is generally made to coincide with that
of "Grattan's Parliament"--of the semi-independent and quite unworkable
Constitution of 1782, which had been extorted from England's weakness
when Ireland was denuded of regular troops, and at the mercy of a
Volunteer National Guard, when Cornwallis had just surrendered at
Yorktown, and Spain and France were once more leagued with half Europe
for the destruction of the British Empire.

It is quite true that the latter part of the eighteenth century was, on
the whole, a time of considerable prosperity to certain classes in
Ireland--a prosperity varied by periods of acute depression and
distress. But that prosperity, such as it was, neither began with
Grattan's Parliament nor ended with it--had, indeed, no more connection
with the Irish Parliament in any of its phases than had the Goodwin
Sands with Tenterden steeple. With the exception of the respite between
the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution,
England