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XXXVIII.

concerning a trade with the British plantations, was CHAP. deferred, as more complex, till after the recess at Christmas.

ture.

Though trade, where it has been so ruined as to Demands of an indepenleave little or no capital, cannot till after a lapse of dent legislayears, be effectively revived, much joy was at first 1780. produced in Ireland by these concessions. But, since the wanton tyranny, exercised by the English parliament on Irish industry, could not be immediately forgotten; and since, to gain the acquiescence of British traders, lord North had represented the concessions as a boon resumable at pleasure; distrust pervaded the public, and an opinion daily gained ground, that without a legislature of its own, totally independent of the British parliament, the privileges of a free commerce, granted to this kingdom, would be quite precarious. Declarations to this purpose were published by the volunteer bands, whose detached companies coalesced into battalions, and assembled occasionally in larger bodies to be reviewed by general officers appointed by their suffrages. Among such declarations was that of the Dublin volunteers, who on the ninth of June 1780, with the duke of Leinster, the premier nobleman, in the chair, as president, resolved" That the king, lords, and commons of Ireland only were competent to make laws binding the subjects of this realm; and that they would not obey, or give operation to any laws, save only those enacted by the king, lords, and commons of Ireland, whose rights and privileges, jointly and severally, they were determined to support with their lives and fortunes.”

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of parlia

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1780.

CH A P. On the nineteenth of the preceding April, a moL tion had been made in the house of commons, by Proceedings Henry Grattan, for their agreement to this resolution, "that no power on earth, save the king, lords, and commons of Ireland, had a right to make laws for Ireland." This motion, after a most interesting debate, which lasted till six o'clock in the morning, was withdrawn by the mover, without entry on the journals, at the instigation of Henry Flood, who knew that a ministerial majority stood engaged to reject it. To shew their gratitude for commercial indulgences, the commons voted the supplies for eighteen months longer, and made provision for the borrowing of six hundred and ten thousand pounds, and for an increase of the revenue to the amount of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. Two bills transmitted to England, were returned with alterations by the British cabinet, and passed into laws by the Irish parliament, much to the general dissatisfaction of the public; one for the punishment of mutiny and desertion in the army, which, instead of being limited to a year, as it had been originally framed, according to the mode always practiced in Britain, was by the alteration rendered perpetual; the other for the imposition of a duty on refined sugars imported into Ireland, for the purpose of encouraging at home the refining business, which bill was so modified by the British cabinet as to reduce the duty. The discontents of the nation were expressed in the resolutions of several volunteer bodies, and other publications, against some of which, con

XXXVIII.

tained in newspapers, of a most libellous nature CHA P. against the house of commons, a vote of censure was passed by that house, without any apparently direct application to the then formidable associations of armed citizens. By a prorogation, on the second of September, an end was put to the session, protracted to an extraordinary length, with augmented unpopularity, since, beside other proceedings of an unpleasing kind, two very popular bills had been rejected, one introduced by Barry Yelverton for a modification of Poyning's law; the other by John Forbes for the independence of the judges.

of the vo

In the place of the earl of Buckinghamshire, who Proceedings was imagined by the British cabinet to have too lunteers. passively permitted the growth of the volunteer 1781-1782. system to a dangerous force, the earl of Carlisle was appointed lord lieutenant at the end of the year 1780, This nobleman found not less difficulty than his predecessor in giving any effective check to the spirit of volunteering, by which the armed societies increased to fifty thousand men, regimented, and improved in tactics by reviews. In one of these exhibitions at Belfast, five thousand four hundred men in one body displayed their evolutions, with a train of thirteen pieces of artillery. Among the attempts made to weaken the associations was a scheme of disunion, the raising of companies by officers who were dependants of government. But this would have proved fallacious, if such a calamity should have happened as a war between the royal army and the volunteers, as in that case the soldiers of these companies

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XXXVIII.

CHAP. Companies would have elected new officers, or have deserted to other leaders. A pleasing testimony, however, was given of the universal attachment of the volunteer bands to the British government, by the offers of their service to the new viceroy in 1781, when an invasion from France and Spain was apprehended. But, with not less determination, than on the defence of their country against the foreign foe, their original motive of arming, were they resolved on the attainment of objects which had afterward arisen successively to their view, a free commerce, and the security of it by a free legislature. At a meeting of the officers and delegates of the first regiment of Ulster, commanded by the earl of Charlemont, at Armagh, on the twenty-eighth of December 1781, resolutions were unanimously voted, and published in the newspapers, in which, after some severe animadversions on parliamentary corruption, an invitation was given to all the volunteer associations in Ulster to send their delegates to a central town of the province, to deliberate on the state of public affairs.

of Dungan

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1782.

Resolutions This meeting of delegates, dreaded by the best friends of Ireland, as a measure fraught with peril, particularly by the earl of Charlemont himself, took place, according to the invitation above-mentioned, at Dungannon, on the fifteenth of February 1782. This amiable and truly patriotic nobleman, unable to prevent, digested resolutions and proceedings for, this formidable assembly, with the help of some friends, particularly the two great orators of the

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Irish commons, Flood and Grattan. The represen- CHA P. tatives of a hundred and forty-three companies, with colonel William Irvine in the chair, voted a number of resolutions, unanimously, except in a few cases, where one or two dissenting voices were heard, and one case where eleven were dissentient. Among these were the following resolutions, here abbreviated : "That a citizen abandons none of his civil rights by learning the use of arms; that a claim of any men, other than the king, lords, and commons of Ireland, to make laws to bind this kingdom, was a grievance unconstitutional: that the same was the case with the powers of the privy-councils of both kingdoms, exereised under colour of Poyning's law; with a mutinybill not limited in time from session to session; with the shutting of the Irish ports from foreign trade by any other authority than that of the Irish parliament; and with the refusal of the same independence to judges in Ireland as was enjoyed by those in England: that they were unalterably determined to seek a redress of these grievances; that four delegates should be nominated for each county in Ulster to form a committee, representative of all the volunteer troops in that province, of whom eleven should constitute a quorum: and that this committee should appoint nine of their members for a committee in Dublin, to communicate with other volunteer associations. In their address to the minority in both houses of parliament they declared, "That they knew their duty to their sovereign, and were loyal; that they knew their duty to themselves, and were reVOL. II, T solved

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