political
organization in Ireland in 1782 was that of the Volunteers of the North,
with their headquarters at Belfast. They represented all that was best
in the Protestant population. They had won the practical victory, such
as it was, Parliament, with all its flaming rhetoric, only the titular
victory. They grasped the essential truth that Parliament was rotten,
and that Ireland's future depended on its reform. Numbering some 80,000
or 100,000, they at once began to press for reform, and, since they had
no constitutional resources, to overawe Parliament. Parliament at once
stood on its dignity and on its civil rights against the "Pretorian
bands." "And now," said Grattan in his magnificent way, "having given a
Parliament to the people, the Volunteers will, I doubt not, leave the
people to Parliament, and thus close specifically and majestically a
great work."

But the work was not begun. Parliament was the enemy of the people, and
the Volunteers knew it. Now, what was the "people" in the minds of the
Volunteers? Undoubtedly they did not, after a century of racial
ascendancy, perform the miracle of accepting at once in its entirety the
principle of absolute political equality for all Irishmen, Catholic and
Protestant alike. Such mental revulsions rarely occur among men, and
when they do occur are apt to produce reactionary cataclysms. But they
did from the first give a real meaning to Grattan's vague rhetoric about
Catholic slaves; from the first they made overtures towards the
Catholics, and ventilated proposals for the Catholic franchise as a part
of their scheme of reform ten years before that enfranchisement, without
Parliamentary reform and therefore valueless, became a practical issue.
For the present these proposals were outvoted, and the effective demand
of the Volunteers, as framed in the great Convention held at Dublin in
November, 1783, was for a purification and reconstruction of Parliament
on a democratic Protestant basis. The Catholic franchise had been
strongly supported, but by the influence of Charlemont and Flood
rejected. It is, of course, easy to maintain in theory that a democratic
Protestant ascendancy so designed was as incompatible with Irish freedom
as an aristocratic and corrupt ascendancy; but nobody with faith in
human nature or any knowledge of history, will care to affirm that the
process of reform would have ended with the enactment of the Volunteer
Bill. No present-day Protestant Ulsterm