-Lieutenant and the practical governors of the country. The results
were what might have been expected. For more than a century Ireland was
the worst governed country in Europe. That its government was not even
worse than it was, was due to its connection with England and the
subordination of its Parliament to the English Privy Council. The Irish
Parliament had no power of originating legislative or financial
measures, and could only say "yes" or "no" to Acts laid before it by
the Privy Council in England. The English Parliament too claimed the
right of binding Ireland as well as England by its enactments, and one
of its statutes transferred the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish
Peerage to the English House of Lords. Galling as these restrictions
were to the plundering aristocracy of Ireland, they formed a useful
check on its tyranny. But as if to compensate for the benefits of this
protection, England did her best from the time of William the Third to
annihilate Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agriculture. Statutes passed
by the jealousy of English landowners forbade the export of Irish cattle
or sheep to English ports. The export of wool was forbidden lest it
might interfere with the profits of English wool-growers. Poverty was
thus added to the curse of misgovernment; and poverty deepened with the
rapid growth of the native population, a growth due in great part to the
physical misery and moral degradation of their lives, till famine turned
the country into a hell.

[Sidenote: The Volunteers.]

The bitter lesson of the last conquest however long sufficed to check
all dreams of revolt among the native Irish; and the outbreaks which
sprang from time to time out of the general misery and discontent were
purely social in their character, and were roughly repressed by the
ruling class. When political revolt at last threatened English
supremacy over Ireland, the threat came from the ruling class itself.
Some timid efforts made by the English Government at the accession of
George the Third to control its tyranny were resented by a refusal of
money bills, and by a cry for the removal of the checks imposed on the
independence of the Irish Parliament. But it was not till the American
war that this cry became a political danger. The threat of a French
invasion and the want of any regular force to oppose it compelled the
Government to call on Ireland to provide for its own defence, and in
answer to its call forty thousand vo