f the Irish Parliament during
that period led to many interferences from England, and the gradual
exclusion of Catholics divided the Parliament from the Irish nation.
The artificial infusion of a fanatical Protestant population by James
I. and Cromwell produced a terrible embitterment of the struggle. There
were crimes on both sides, and calamities beyond telling. But, with all
that, it is still to be doubted whether any of those centuries presents
such a picture of national decay, both industrial and social, as is
presented by the Ireland of the nineteenth century.

For through the blackness of that night the Irish Parliament always
shone like a star. Ireland grew with its growth, and withered with its
decay. Precisely as she had more Home Rule she advanced, and precisely
as she had less she fell back. But as long as the Parliament existed at
all it could never be said that the final spark of liberty had been
stamped out.

Even in the eighteenth century, when Catholic Ireland seemed to be
crushed, and Ireland lay supine beneath the double weight of the penal
laws and the commercial restrictions of England--an Ireland pictured
for all time by the keen, merciless pen of Dean Swift--still the vestal
flame was not quite extinguished. Captured by ascendancy, dominated by
fanaticism, narrowed to one faith, or even to one section of that
faith, the Irish Parliament still always provided a framework and
machinery for a possible moment of regeneration and recovery.

That moment came in 1782--came, unhappily both for England and for
Ireland, in such a form as to seem to justify the hard
saying--"England's danger is Ireland's opportunity."

The story of 1782 has been told with surpassing brilliancy in the
greatest of all Mr. Lecky's books--the darling of his youth and the
worry of his old age--his "Leaders of Irish Public Opinion."[63] The
disastrous and wasting struggle against our own kith and kin in the
American colonies--forced on England by the folly of the same type of
statesmen now resisting Home Rule--had reduced these islands to an
almost defenceless condition. The British Army, intended for the
defence of Great Britain, had been sent away into the forests and
prairies of Northern America to fight an invisible foe, and to meet
with a disastrous and undeserved defeat. But in their blind passion to
subdue the Americans the British Government had for the moment
forgotten Ireland. In their eagerness to conquer their colo