with a perversity of judgment which his warmest admirers
must find it difficult to reconcile with statesmanship, if not with
patriotism, even opposed with extreme bitterness a bill for the
establishment of a police for Dublin, though he could not deny that
there existed in the city an organized body of ruffians, who made not
only the streets but even the dwelling-houses of the more orderly
citizens unsafe, by outrages of the worst kind, committed on the largest
scale--assaults, plunderings, ravishments, and murders. In the rural
districts of the South the disturbances were so criminally violent, and
so incessant, that the Lord-lieutenant was compelled to request the
presence of some additional regiments from England, as the sole means of
preserving any kind of respect for the law; and more than once the mobs
of rioters showed themselves so bold and formidable, that the soldiers
were compelled to fire in self-defence, and order was not restored but
at the cost of many lives.

Presently a Conspiracy Bill was passed, and gradually the firmness of
the government re-established a certain amount of internal tranquillity.
But shortly afterward a crisis arose which, more than the debates on the
commercial propositions, or on the Volunteers, or on the police, showed
how over-liberal had been the confidence of the English minister who had
repealed Poynings' Act, and had bestowed independent authority on the
Irish Parliament before the members had learned how to use it. We have
seen how keen a contest was excited in the English Parliament by the
deranged condition of the King's health in 1788, and the necessity which
consequently arose for the appointment of a Regency. Grattan was in
London at the time, where he had contracted a personal intimacy with
Fox, and had been presented by him to the Prince of Wales, whose
graciousness of manner, and profession of adherence to the Whig system
of politics, secured his attachment to that party. Grattan was easily
indoctrinated by Fox with his theory of the indefeasible claim of the
Prince to the Regency as his birthright, and is understood to have
promised that the Irish Parliament should adopt that view. The case was
one which seemed unprovided for. There was no question but that the law
enacted that the sovereign of England should also be the sovereign of
Ireland. But no express law of either country contained any such
stipulation respecting a Regent; and Grattan conceived that, in the
a