r) encouraged Protestant
landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still
further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the
benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied
Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown
away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete
farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance,
were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110
Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of
light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system
which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of them had
some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became a strong Emancipator,
but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to
reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a
determination to keep power in the hands of landed property. In England,
which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no
more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly
as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it. But in Ireland, which
was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian
landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charlemont
was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic Reformer before
Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as
Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias
inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear
of Catholic revenge for past wrongs. These men and their like, admirable
and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in
those terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had
any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy
Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever
conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came
over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter
of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under
circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say
with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely
ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish
patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, howeve