May 26th, 1800).

CHAPTER VIII.

HOME RULE IN HISTORY

Grattan's Parliament was the first Parliament with full legislative
authority possessed by Ireland since the time of Henry VII. It existed
for nearly twenty years, and in that brief time it did a great work for
Ireland. If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough,
in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament
with his venomous hate, and finally compassed its doom--the famous
Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:--

"=There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe
which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in
manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as
Ireland.="[65]

But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points
of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by
experience. One was that although the Irish Parliament obtained the
right of legislation, the appointment of the Government and the
Executive was still placed in the hands of the Irish Privy Council, and
therefore of the British Central Government. That meant, in the end,
that the British Government still possessed the leverage for recovering
the powers of legislative initiative and legislative veto.

As far as Ireland possessed separate executive powers, she used them
with loyalty and patriotism. Take, for instance, her finance. Ireland
possessed, under the settlement, a separate Irish Exchequer, and the
British Government could levy no war taxes in Ireland, except with the
consent of the Irish Parliament. That gave to the Irish Parliament an
immense power of checking and hampering England in her struggle against
Napoleon. If we were to judge from some of the talk heard at the
present moment, one would take for granted that Ireland must have
refused all help to England in that struggle.

On the contrary, the Irish Parliament voted sums freely to Pitt for the
wars against France. The Irish statesmen would have no dealings with
the English Whigs in their pro-French policy. Like that other great
Irishman, Edmund Burke, Grattan was opposed to the spirit of the French
Revolution. In that great European crisis Ireland showed herself what
she really is--a nation inclined in all essentials to conservative
rather than revolutionary ideas.

"CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION"

But it was the existence of a separate external executive, gradually
limiting the legislative