amic impulse for
commercial freedom and legislative independence was originating now,
outside the walls of Parliament.

The rupture with France in 1778 denuded Ireland of troops, and called
into being the Protestant Volunteers; a disciplined, armed body, headed
by leaders as weighty and respectable as Lord Charlemont. This body,
formed originally for home defence, by a natural and legitimate
transition assumed a political aspect, and demanded from a dismayed and
terrorized Government commercial freedom for Ireland. For once in her
life Ireland was too strong to be coerced. Punishment like that applied
to Massachusetts was physically impossible. The bitter protests of
English merchants passed unheeded, and the fiscal claims of the
Volunteers, with their cannon labelled "Free Trade or this," were
granted in full early in 1780. The moral was to persist. From 40,000 the
numbers of the Volunteers rose in the two succeeding years to 80,000,
and they stood firm for further concessions. The national movement grew
like a river in spate; it swept forward the lethargic Catholics and
engulfed Parliament. In a tempest of enthusiasm Grattan's Declaration of
Independence was carried unanimously in the Irish House of Commons on
April 16, 1782, and a month later received legal confirmation in England
at the hands of the same Whig Government and Parliament which broke off
hostilities with America, and in the same session.

America took her own road and worked out her own magnificent destiny.
Most of us now honour Washington and the citizen troops he led. We say
they fought, as Hampden and their English forefathers fought, for a
sublime ideal, freedom, and that they were chips of the old block. But
let not distance delude us into supposing that they were without the
full measure of human weakness, or that they did not suffer
considerable, perhaps permanent, harm from the ten years of smothered
revolt and lawless agitation, followed by the seven years of open war
which preceded their victory. Washington's genius carried them safely
through the ordeal of the war, and the still more exacting ordeal of
political reconstruction after the war, but it is well known how nearly
he and his staunchest supporters failed. The Revolution, like all
revolutions, brought out all the bad as well as all the good in human
nature. Bad laws always deteriorate a people; they breed a contempt for
law which coercion only aggravates, and which survives the establ