been carried with universal consent. The Catholics
were perfectly passive, and would gladly have accepted a change which
withdrew them from the direct government of the conquerors in a recent
civil war. The Protestants had as yet no distinctively national
feeling, and a legislative Union would have emancipated their industry
and added enormously to their security. Molyneux, the first great
champion of the legislative independence of Ireland, emphatically
declared that he and those who thought with him would gladly have
accepted the alternative of a Union, and both the Irish Houses of
Parliament voted addresses in favour of such a measure. If it had
been carried, Ireland would have been at least saved from the evils
that rose from the commercial restrictions and from the extreme
jobbing that grew up around the local legislature, and she would,
perhaps, have been saved from some parts of the penal code. But the
golden opportunity was lost. The English commercial classes dreaded
Irish competition in their markets, and the petition of the Irish
legislature was disregarded.

Nearly seventy years of quiet followed. The establishment of the
Hanoverian dynasty, the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, the
different wars in which England was engaged, left Ireland absolutely
undisturbed. The House of Commons then sat for a whole reign and met
only every second year. It was completely subservient to the English
Privy Council, and it consisted so largely of nomination boroughs that
a few great nobles commanded a decisive preponderance, and they
practically conducted the government and administered the patronage of
Ireland. There was great jobbing and corruption, but taxation, on the
whole, was exceedingly light, and there was no tendency to throw it
unduly on the poor, or to create in Ireland any of the many feudal
burdens that prevailed in France and Germany. The practical evil most
felt was the system of tithes for the support of the Protestant
establishment, and it was aggravated by a very unfair exemption of
pasture land, and also by the prevailing system of farming out tithes
to a class of men known as tithe proctors. In the country districts
all power was concentrated in the hands of the landlords, who, with
many faults and under many difficulties, at least succeeded in
attaining a large measure of genuine popularity.

There was an Irish army of twelve thousand men, but the greater part
of it was always sent abroad in time o