land, and up to the time of the War of Independence in America no
Catholic in Great Britain or Ireland could sit in Parliament, or vote
for the election of a member of Parliament, or act as a barrister or
solicitor, or sit on a bench of magistrates or on a grand jury, or hold
land, or obtain legal security for a loan. No doubt the state of the
penal laws as they then existed was mitigated when compared with that
which had prevailed but a short time before, when an ordinary Catholic
had hardly any right to do more than live in Ireland, and a Catholic
priest had not even a legal right to live there. But up to the time
when the growing principles of liberty manifested themselves in the
overthrow of the feudal system in France the Catholics in Great Britain
and Ireland were practically excluded from any approach to civil or
religious liberty. Ireland had a Parliament, but it was a Parliament
of Protestants, elected by Protestants, and it was in fact a mere
department of the King's Administration. The American War of
Independence suddenly awakened wild hopes in the breasts of all
oppressed nationalities, and the Irish Catholic population was among
the first to be quickened by the new life and the new hope. The
national idea was not, however, at first for a separation from England.
Ireland was then for the most part under the leadership of Henry
Grattan, a patriot, statesman, and orator--an orator whom Charles James
Fox described as the "Irish Demosthenes," and whom Byron glorified as
"with all that Demosthenes wanted endued, and his rival and victor in
all he possessed."

Grattan's purpose was not separation from England or the setting up of
an independent republic. An Ireland enjoying religious equality for
all denominations and possessing a Parliament thoroughly independent of
that sitting at Westminster would have satisfied all his patriotic
ambition. In fact, what Grattan would have desired for Ireland is
exactly such a system as is now possessed by one {308} of the provinces
of Canada or Australia. When the alliance between France and
independent America began to threaten Great Britain, and the English
Government practically acknowledged its inability to provide for the
defence of Ireland, Henry Grattan, with other Irish patriots of equal
sincerity, and some of them of even higher social rank, started the
Irish Volunteer movement, to be a bulwark of the country in case of
foreign invasion. When the Irish patrio