who survived admission to this beautiful institution, taken on a large number of years, was 130. The annual expenses were 16,000l. Each child, therefore, who was saved from death was costing the public 1107. He expected to find, he said, that his original information had understated the frauds, but had exaggerated the cruelty. He had been sorry to find that although the robbery was, as he anticipated, greater, the murders were no fewer than he had before declared. The wretched little ones were sent up from all parts of Ireland, ten or twelve of them thrown together into a "kish," or basket, forwarded on a low-backed car, and so bruised and crushed and shaken at their journey's end that half of them were taken out dead and were flung into the dung-heap.

The Irish members were not especially soft-hearted, but they could not listen without emotion to so horrible a tale. One speaker appealed to his fox-hunting friends whether they would not be more careful in transmitting the whelps of their hounds. Dennis Browne said truly that of all stories he had ever read or heard of, the report of the committee was the most horrible.1

Such was the actual discharge of the common duties of humanity in Dublin in the days when Ireland had her own Parliament, and patriotic hearts were at white heat to raise their country in the scale of nations. But the popular tribunes, who were so busy with the removal of ideal grievances, had no leisure for the petty details of crime and misery. Sir John Blaquiere was no political saint, but he could see the horrors of wholesale infanticide. Grattan preferred to rave against corruption, and even in his

1 Irish Debates, March 12, 1792.

raving was but half sincere. When he divided the House upon the mode in which the Castle influence was exerted, Arthur O'Connor, the most advanced Radical in the House, voted against him. The Castle majority had been created only to overcome the yet grosser monopoly of power and patronage by the Boyles and Ponsonbies. O'Connor refused to assist Grattan in reinvigorating an aristocracy "who had misgoverned Ireland from the day of the Conquest.” 1 1 Irish Debates, March 19, 1791.

VOL. III.

SECTION V.

THE session of 1791 was as barren as its predecessor. The working forces of the drama were no longer in the Parliament. Could the Catholics be kept from dangerous courses, they had a prospect of immediate and perhaps complete emancipation from the English Cabinet. The more disturbing, therefore, to their moderate friends in both countries was the institution and rapid growth of the United Irishmen. At Beaconsfield especially they were watched with an emotion which became at last unbearable. Mr. Richard Burke, as often happens with the children of men of genius, resembled his father in the form and manner of his mind. The intellect only was absent, and the place of it was supplied by vanity. In his own family his defects were invisible. Edmund Burke regarded Richard as immeasurably his own superior. They had met and spoken with Keogh when he was in London on the business of the Catholic Committee. It was then perhaps that Richard Burke offered his services to reconcile the two Catholic factions, and secure for both the confidence of the British Government.

No time was to be lost. The Dublin Lodge of United Irishmen contained already many Catholics. It was even spoken of as a Catholic society.1 Napper 1 "Lord Westmoreland to Dundas, November 21, 1791.”

Tandy the noisiest of the demagogues, was its secretary, and the violence of its manifestoes was fast neutralizing the efforts of the Viceroy to reconcile influential Protestants to emancipation.

Describing himself as the agent of the Catholic Committee, young Burke waited on Pitt and Dundas. They expressed their pleasure that the Irish Catholics should have chosen a representative whose name was a security that they did not mean to join with the revolutionists. They acknowledged their own general wish to see the Catholics restored to their rights as citizens. But Pitt, it is likely, saw the character of the person with whom he was dealing - he declined to say anything specific till he knew the sentiments of the Irish Government. Richard Burke said he was going himself to Dublin. He asked to be allowed to correspond privately with the Cabinet. Pitt declined to communicate with him except through the Secretary at the Castle. He begged to be allowed to take over with him " a confidential communication of the sentiments which Mr. Pitt had expressed," that he might show it to his friends. Pitt told him positively "he could not gratify him in that matter." He asked whether Mr. Pitt would recommend him to go. Pitt said that he must judge for himself, and declined to advise. He consented, however, to give Burke a letter of introduction to the Lord-Lieutenant. "From the anxiety which Mr. Burke expressed that the Catholics and Dissenters should not form a union together, the Cabinet had no desire to restrain though they could not hinder his journey." 1

Such was the account given by Dundas of this in

1 "Dundas to Westmoreland, January 29, 1792. Private." — S. P. O.

terview, and had he told the whole truth, Westmoreland would have had no cause of complaint. But in the unguarded freedom of a private conversation the Ministers had evidently gone further than Dundas acknowledged. They had allowed Burke to talk at length to them on the history of Ireland, to dilate on the penal laws, to represent the Catholics as the harmless victims of Protestant tyranny, and perhaps unconsciously they had permitted these views to influence their policy. The same packet which carried Burke to Dublin carried a public and a private letter from Dundas to Westmoreland. The public letter instructed him to recommend to the Irish Parliament the concessions which had been already made in England, the admission of the Catholics to the bar and the magistracy, the repeal of the Intermarriage Act, and the repeal of the law which forbade them to possess arms. On the franchise, too, the language was scarcely ambiguous. The Viceroy was not formally directed to make enfranchisement a government measure. It was admitted to be dangerous. But he was informed that "the Cabinet considered that the risk to the Protestant interest would be greater by the total exclusion of the Catholics than by their admission." 1

Such instructions were, to say the least of them, extremely serious. The franchise was a point on which Protestant opinion in Ireland was passionately sensitive, and on which the Catholic Committee was itself divided. It was still withheld even in England, and at that very moment Fingal, Kenmare, Gormanstown, and the other moderate Catholics who had seceded from the more violent faction, were sending in

1 "Dundas to Westmoreland, December 26, 1791."