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VIII.

Having thus relieved his mind, and having spoken what, however English statesmen might please to March. quarrel with it, was, is, and will be the exact truth

1793.

upon the subject, the Chancellor concluded with saying that he would not divide the House against the Bill; and it was allowed to pass.

No immediately serious consequences were to be apprehended till the passing of a Reform Bill, and against a Reform Bill the Cabinet was firm. The Dungannon Convention met on the 15th of February, and decided that they must have it. Grattan brought the question before the House without waiting for the report of the committee. He electrified his hearers with the brilliancy of his oratory, but he failed to convince them that the Reform and Emancipation combined did not mean revolution. They admired the rhetoric; they acted by common sense.

'We have risks,' said Dennis Brown, 'like other countries, but risks peculiar to ourselves. Timidity is not the way of safety. If we are to be directed by every breath of discontent, there is an end of us; property, life, and liberty will be buried in anarchy and confusion.'

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The Reform Bill had been called in the debate an olive-branch of peace.' The olive,' said Bushe, 'is like other trees, and will not take root if planted in a storm. If you must touch the foundation of the building which has sheltered yourselves and your ancestors, let it be when the winds are at peace. You are choosing the Equinox, when Government and Anarchy are contending like day and night.' Grattan himself would probably not have demanded Reform at such a moment, had he not known that success was impossible. The House understood that after the

II.

concessions to the Catholics their hope of safety CHAP. lay in strengthening the Executive Government, and they threw out the Reform Bill by a majority which for the present quenched the agitation.

The strength of Government was concentrated in resisting Reform, because Reform, among its other effects, would have been fatal to the Union; on all else the rule was to give way. After resisting for sixty years, the Cabinet consented to a limitation of the Pension List, which was reduced to 80,000l. a year; the Hereditary Revenue was surrendered and exchanged for a Civil List; while a further Act for securing the independence of Parliament closed a scandalous chapter in the constitutional history of Ireland; and persons holding pensions during pleasure, or any salaried office under the Crown, were declared ineligible to any future Legislature. The present House had still four years to run. In parting with the power which hitherto had alone enabled the Viceroys to carry on the Government, Pitt, it is likely, had already determined that the days of an independent Irish Legislature were numbered.

1793.

March.

1 33 George III., cap. 34.

2 33 George III., cap. 41.

BOOK
VIII.

1793.
April.

SECTION II.

HAD the gains and losses in the game of intrigue been confined to the players, their strokes and counter-strokes might have been observed with contemptuous interest. Behind Ministers and delegates lay unhappily the Irish people, who were being driven mad by visionary hopes, and through a thousand channels were taught to look for the day when Ireland would be once more their own, and the tyranny of centuries would be over. They were told that they were emancipated. To them emancipation meant that they were to pay no more rents and tithes. They heard of religious equality. If religious equality was to be worth having, it implied equality of property, land at ten shillings an acre or no shillings, and the sacred soil of Ireland no longer trampled by the hoof of the invader.1

The determination of Pitt to force on the Catholic question had passed like a stream of oxygen over the half-smothered and smouldering ashes. Savage at the submission of the Catholic Committee to Major Hobart's terms, the agitators told the peasantry that they were betrayed. The Defenders became every hour more numerous and more audacious. The United Irishmen of Dublin published a furious attack on the Secret Committee of the Lords which was almost an invitation to violence. The Government had little fear of open rebellion. They had great and wellgrounded fears for the lives of the Protestant fami

1 Miscellaneous reports from the South and West of Ireland, April and May, 1793. S. P. O.

lies who were scattered over the country by secret CHAP. assassination.

To chain up the incendiary spirit before the fire spread further they summoned Simon Butler and Oliver Bond' to the Bar of the Upper House, sent them for six months to Newgate for breach of privilege, and fined each of them 500l. The increase of the army made possible at last more vigorous measures against the Defenders. Throughout the midland counties the peasants were now armed, either out of the Volunteer stores surreptitiously dispersed among them, or by the plunder of the houses of Protestants. They were not afraid to meet the troops in the field: 'in Louth fifty of them were killed in a single fight in February; above a hundred were lodged in gaol; yet the Government felt that they were not yet at the bottom of the plot.' 2

Undeterred by the suppression of 'the National Guard' in Dublin, the Northern Republicans paraded in green uniforms at Belfast. General Whyte was sent down in March to enforce submission. The Liberal journals published blazing stories of dragoons dashing through the streets with drawn sabres, insulting Patriot tradesmen and behaving like infuriated savages, till the heroic Volunteers drew out and drove them from the town.3 General Whyte tells what really occurred. He had sent four troops of the 17th Dragoons to disarm the 'Guard.' On the evening of the 9th of March a corporal and a private, off duty, strolled out of the barracks into the city, where they met a crowd of people round a fiddler, who was

1 The Chairman and Secretary 26, 1793.' of the Dublin lodge.

2 'Ed. Cooke to Nepean, Feb.

3 See Tone's Memoirs, March, 1793.

II.

1793.

April.

VIII.

1793. March.

BOOK playing Ça ira. They told the fiddler to play God Save the King.' The mob damned the King, with all his dirty slaves, and threw a shower of stones at them. The two dragoons, joined by a dozen of their comrades, drew their sabres and drove the town before them.' Patriot Belfast had decorated its shops with sign-boards representing Republican notables. The soldiers demolished Dumourier, demolished Mirabeau, demolished the venerable Franklin.' The Patriots, so brave in debate, so eloquent in banquet, ran before a dozen Englishmen. A hundred and fifty Volunteers came out, but retreated into the Exchange and barricaded themselves. The officers of the 17th came up before any one had been seriously hurt, and recalled the men to their quarters. In the morning General Whyte came in from Carrickfergus, went to the Volunteer committee room, and said that unless the gentlemen in the Exchange came out and instantly dispersed, he would order the regiment under arms. They obeyed without a word. 'Never,' said Whyte, 'was any guard relieved with more satisfaction to themselves.' The dragoons received a reprimand, but not too severe, as the General felt that they had done more good than harm. On the 11th the Sovereign of Belfast was informed that the meeting of unauthorised armed associations was now forbidden by law; the Volunteers must cease to exist, and if they again assembled they would be apprehended and punished. The order was obeyed. The citizen defenders of Ireland's liberties,' said the ' Northern Star,' the organ of the United Irishmen, 'considered it more

1 McCabe, the owner of one of these shops, hung up his own portrait afterwards in the place of the destroyed friend of liberty, with

the words 'McCabe, an Irish slave.'

2 Report of General Whyte, enclosed in a letter of March 19 from Westmoreland to Dundas.

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