en the Parliament House and the Castle when, according to
custom, the members of the two Houses marched in procession to present
their addresses to the Lord-lieutenant. Such a recognition of the power
of this new force stimulated those members who claimed in a special
degree the title of Friends of Ireland to greater exertion. A wiser
government than that of Lord North would have avoided giving occasion
for the existence of a force which the utter absence of any other had
made masters of the situation. The Volunteers even boasted that they had
been called into existence by English misgovernment. In the words of one
of their most eloquent advocates, "England had sown her laws like
dragons' teeth, and they had sprung up as armed men."

Ireland began to feel that she was strong, and, not unnaturally desired
to avail herself of that strength, which England now could not question,
to put forward demands for concessions which in common fairness could
not well be denied. In 1778, when Lord North, in the hope of recovering
the allegiance of the North American Colonies, brought forward what he
termed his conciliatory propositions, the Irish members began to press
their demand that the advantages thus offered to the Americans should be
extended to their own countrymen also; that the fact of the Irish not
having rebelled should not be made a plea for treating them worse than
those who had; and in the front of all their requests was one for the
abolition of those unjust and vexatious duties which shackled their
trade and manufactures. But the jealousy of the English and Scotch
manufacturers was still as bitter, and, unhappily, still as influential,
as it had proved in the time of William III. And, to humor the grasping
selfishness of Manchester and Glasgow, Lord North met the demands of the
Irish with a refusal of which every word of his speech on the
propositions to America was the severest condemnation, and which he
sought to mitigate by some new regulations in favor of the linen trade,
to which the English and Scotch manufacturers made no objection, since
they had no linen factories. The Irish, in despair, had recourse to
non-importation agreements, of which the Americans had set the example,
binding themselves not to import nor to use any articles of English or
Scotch manufacture with which they could possibly dispense. And the
result was, that Lord North yielded to fear what he had refused to
justice, and the next year brought