ud of his pure Greek blood, and fully
qualified to send a chariot to the Olympic race course, would have
rejected the name of Gaul or Libyan. He was, in the phrase of that
time, an English gentleman of family and fortune born in Ireland. He had
studied at the Temple, had travelled on the Continent, had become
well known to the most eminent scholars and philosophers of Oxford and
Cambridge, had been elected a member of the Royal Society of London, and
had been one of the founders of the Royal Society of Dublin. In the days
of Popish ascendancy he had taken refuge among his friends here; he
had returned to his home when the ascendancy of his own caste had been
reestablished; and he had been chosen to represent the University of
Dublin in the House of Commons. He had made great efforts to promote the
manufactures of the kingdom in which he resided; and he had found those
efforts impeded by an Act of the English Parliament which laid severe
restrictions on the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. In
principle this Act was altogether indefensible. Practically it was
altogether unimportant. Prohibitions were not needed to prevent the
Ireland of the seventeenth century from being a great manufacturing
country; nor could the most liberal bounties have made her so. The
jealousy of commerce, however, is as fanciful and unreasonable as the
jealousy of love. The clothiers of Wilts and Yorkshire were weak enough
to imagine that they should be ruined by the competition of a half
barbarous island, an island where there was far less capital than in
England, where there was far less security for life and property than
in England, and where there was far less industry and energy among the
labouring classes than in England. Molyneux, on the other hand, had
the sanguine temperament of a projector. He imagined that, but for
the tyrannical interference of strangers, a Ghent would spring up
in Connemara, and a Bruges in the Bog of Allen. And what right had
strangers to interfere? Not content with showing that the law of which
he complained was absurd and unjust, he undertook to prove that it was
null and void. Early in the year 1698 he published and dedicated to the
King a treatise in which it was asserted in plain terms that the English
Parliament had no authority over Ireland.

Whoever considers without passion or prejudice the great constitutional
question which was thus for the first time raised will probably be
of opinion that Moly