s lay not only
that large portion of the national income known as the hereditary
revenue, but the whole machinery of patronage and corruption. Even the
legislative independence was unreal; for majorities still had to be
bought, Irish Bills had still to receive the Royal Assent, that is,
English ministerial assent; so that powerful English pressure could be,
and was, brought to bear upon their policy and construction. And the
worst of it was that English pressure here and elsewhere meant then what
it meant in the next century, and what it too often means now, English
party pressure exercised spasmodically and ignorantly, in order to serve
sectional English ends. In short, Ireland, so far from being a nation,
was still virtually a Colony, subjected to the worst conceivable form of
colonial Government, groaning under economic evils unknown in the least
fortunate of the Colonies, and without the numerous mitigating
circumstances and the hope of ultimate cure due to remoteness from the
seat of Empire. On the contrary, nearness to England, and, above all,
nearness to France, where the misrule and miseries of ages were about to
culminate in a fearful upheaval of social order, complicated immensely
the problem of regeneration in Ireland.

What was the remedy? Parliamentary reform. The Volunteers saw this
instantly. Parliament itself scouted the idea of reform, because it
threatened the Protestant ascendancy. Any weakening of the Protestant
ascendancy was unthinkable to Irish statesmen, even to Grattan, who in
1778 had coined the grandiose phrase that "the Irish Protestant could
never be free until the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave," and
who afterwards explained what he meant by saying that the liberty of the
Catholic was to be only such as was "entirely consistent with the
Protestant ascendancy," and that "the Protestant interest was his first
object." Ascendancy, then, in the mind of the ruling class in Ireland
was fundamental. What was its corollary? Dependence on England.
Ascendancies, whether based on creed or property, or, as in Ireland, on
both, cannot last in any white community without external support, and
the external support for ascendancy in Ireland was English force without
and English bribes within. There was the chain of causation, the vicious
circle rather; and yet Grattan, who never touched a bribe, thought he
had freed his beloved Ireland from the English influences which were
throttling her. He coul