in bills to grant the Irish the
commercial equality which they demanded. Some of the most oppressive and
vexatious of the penal laws were also relaxed; and some restrictions
which the Navigation Act imposed on commerce with the West Indies were
repealed. But, strange to say, the English ministers still clung to one
grievance of monstrous injustice, and steadily refused to allow judicial
appointments to be placed on the same footing as in England, and to make
the seat of a judge on the bench depend on his own good conduct, instead
of on the caprice of a king or a minister.

But the manifest reluctance with which the English government had
granted this partial relief encouraged the demand for farther
concessions. The Irish members, rarely deficient in eloquence or
fertility of resource, had been lately re-enforced by a recruit of
pre-eminent powers, whom Lord Charlemont had returned for his borough of
Moy, Henry Grattan; and, led by him, began to insist that the remaining
grievances, to the removal of which the nation had a right, would never
be extinguished so long as the supreme power of legislation for the
country rested with the English and Scotch Parliament; and that the true
remedy was only to be found in the restoration to the Irish Parliament
of that independence of which it had been deprived ever since the time
of Henry VII. They were encouraged by the visibly increasing weakness of
Lord North's administration. Throughout the year 1781 it was evidently
tottering to its fall. And on the 22d of February, 1782, Grattan brought
forward in the Irish House of Commons a resolution, intended, if
carried, to lay the foundation of a bill, "that a claim of any body of
men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to bind this
kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." This resolution
aimed at the abolition of Poynings' Act. Other resolutions demanded the
abolition of the "powers exercised by the Privy Council under color of
Poynings' Act," and a farther relaxation of the penal laws. So helpless
did the government by this time feel itself, that the Attorney-general,
who was its spokesman on this occasion, could not venture to resist the
principle of these resolutions, but was contented to elude them for the
time by objections taken to some of the details; and Grattan gave notice
of another motion to bring the question to a more definite decision,
which he fixed for the 16th of April.

Before that day c