forces should
take his place.[81] When, later on, the Viceroy resided, it was a rule
that the Chief Secretary should be an Englishman. On the occasion when
Lord Castlereagh was by way of exception admitted to that office, an
apology was found for it in his entire devotion to English policy and
purposes. "His appointment," says Lord Cornwallis, "gives me great
satisfaction, as he is so very unlike an Irishman!"[82] Resources were
also found in the military profession, and among the voters for the
Union we find the names of eight[83] English generals.

The arrangements under Poynings's Law, and the commercial proscription,
drove the iron ever deeper and deeper into the souls of Irishmen. It is
but small merit in the Irish Parliament of George I. and George II., if
under these circumstances a temper was gradually formed in, and
transmitted by, them, which might one day achieve the honours of
patriotism. It was in dread of this most healthful process, that the
English Government set sedulously to work for its repression. The odious
policy was maintained by a variety of agencies; by the misuse of Irish
revenue, a large portion of which was unhappily under their control; by
maintaining the duration of the Irish House of Commons for the life of
the Sovereign; and, worst of all, by extending the range of corruption
within the walls, through the constant multiplication of paid offices
tenable by members of Parliament without even the check of re-election
on acceptance.

Thus by degrees those who sat in the Irish Houses came to feel both that
they had a country, and that their country had claims upon them. The
growth of a commercial interest in the Roman Catholic body must have
accelerated the growth of this idea, as that interest naturally fell
into line with the resistance to the English prescriptive laws. But the
rate of progress was fearfully slow. It was hemmed in on every side by
the obstinate unyielding pressure of selfish interests: the interest of
the Established Church against the Presbyterians; the interest of the
Protestant laity, or tithe-payers, against the clergy; the bold
unscrupulous interest of a landlords' Parliament against the occupier of
the soil; which, together with the grievance of the system of
tithe-proctors, established in Ireland through the Whiteboys the fatal
alliance between resistance to wrong and resistance to law, and supplied
there the yet more disastrous facility of sustaining and enforcing w