sition.

Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between the ministry
and their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we might have expected from
Burke at least his usual wisdom and patience. We saw in a previous
chapter (p. 33) what the political condition of Ireland was when Burke
went there with Hamilton in 1763. The American war had brought about a
great change. The king had shrewdly predicted that if America became
free Ireland would soon follow the same plan and be a separate state.
In fact, along with the American war we had to encounter an Irish war
also; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at the
time, a smothered war. Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish entered
into non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce. The
Irish volunteers, first forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred
thousand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the
English ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the
actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for commercial and
legislative independence. They were too strong to be resisted, and in
1782 the Irish Parliament acquired the privilege of initiating and
conducting its own business, without the sanction or control either of
the Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Dazzled by the chance
of acquiring legislative independence, they had been content with the
comparatively small commercial boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke
in 1778, and with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed
minister in the following year. After the concession of their
independence in 1782, they found that to procure the abolition of the
remaining restrictions on their commerce--the right of trade, for
instance, with America and Africa--the consent of the English
legislature was as necessary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from the
teaching of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 1785 his
famous commercial propositions. The theory of his scheme was that
Irish trade should be free, and that Ireland should be admitted to a
permanent participation in commercial advantages. In return for this
gain, after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to
devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the navy,
in which the two nations had a common interest. Pitt was to be
believed when he declared that of all the objects of his political
life this was, in his opinion, the most important that he had ever
engage