arliament. It
was, curiously enough, the Irish Presbyterians of Ulster--our friends,
the Orangemen--who sowed the seeds of revolt against the Protestant
Parliament of 1782. It was they, in the combination known as the
"United Irishmen," who started the movement that culminated in the
Irish Rebellion in 1798. These Presbyterian Nonconformists had all been
deeply affected by the doctrines of the French Revolution. They had for
years past been agitating for a reform of the Irish Parliament on the
lines subsequently adopted in 1831--chiefly by the abolition of the
rotten boroughs. Grattan was with them, but again he was powerless. He
was opposed, both in Dublin and in London, by the existing executives.
Those executives now rested their power almost entirely on the members
returned by those very same rotten boroughs. For ever since 1782
bribery had been going on, and as early as 1790 England had been
rapidly buying back the hold she had lost in 1782. These being her
weapons, it was not likely that the Irish executive was going to yield
to the claims of the Irish Presbyterians. The Government resisted, and
the movement of the Irish Reformers became more and more formidable.

All these causes of unrest culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798--a
horrible event, beginning with the lawlessness of the revolutionary
Presbyterians in the north--lawlessness so feebly checked as to raise
grave suspicions in regard to the attitude of the Irish Government
itself towards a possible revolution. But the outrages of the Orangemen
on the Catholics in Ulster, and the Catholic feeling of desertion by
the Government, soon produced a far more terrible outbreak in the
south. That practically culminated in a religious war between Catholic
and Protestant. From that moment the Rebellion was marked by atrocities
on both sides almost as terrible as anything which occurred in the
French Revolution. The Rebellion was extinguished in blood and fire.

The period of exhaustion and despair that followed in Ireland was
seized upon by Castlereagh and Pitt for destroying the Irish
Parliament. An immense machinery of bribery and corruption, assisted by
pledges that were broken and prophecies that failed, all working under
the double shadow of rebellion and war, drove the Irish Parliament to
reluctant suicide, and passed into law, both at Dublin and Westminster,
the Union Act of 1800.

That great light of the Irish Parliament thus passed suddenly into
dark