destination.
Finally, the acute state-craft of Primate Boulter resisted habitually
the creation of an "Irish interest," and above all any capacity of the
Roman Catholics to contribute to its formation; and in the first year of
George II. a clause was introduced in committee into a harmless Bill[95]
for the regulation of elections, which disfranchised at a single stroke
all the Roman Catholic voters in Ireland who up to that period had
always enjoyed the franchise.

It is painful to record the fact that the remarkable progress gradually
achieved was in no way due to British influence. For nearly forty years
from the arrival of Archbishop Boulter in Ireland, the government of
Ireland was in the hands of the Primates. The harshness of
administration was gradually tempered, especially in the brief
viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield; but the British policy was steadily
opposed to the enlargement of Parliamentary privilege, or the creation
of any Irish interest, however narrow its basis, while the political
extinction of the mass of the people was complete. The pecuniary wants,
however, of the Government, extending beyond the hereditary revenue,
required a resort to the national purse. The demands which were
accordingly made, and these alone, supplied the Parliament with a
vantage-ground, and a principle of life. The action of this principle
brought with it civilizing and humanizing influences, which had become
clearly visible in the early years of George III., and which were
cherished by the war of American Independence, as by a strong current of
fresh air in a close and murky dungeon.

The force of principles, and the significance of political achievements,
is to be estimated in no small degree by the slenderness of the means
available to those who promote them. And the progress brought about in
the Irish Parliament is among the most remarkable on record, because it
was effected against the joint resistance of a hostile Executive and of
an intolerable constitution. Of the three hundred members, about
two-thirds were nominated by individual patrons and by close
corporations. What was still worse, the action of the Executive was
increasingly directed, as the pulse of the national life came to beat
more vigorously, to the systematic corruption of the Parliament borough
pensions and paid offices. In the latter part of the century, more than
one-third of the members of Parliament were dismissible at pleasure from
public emolumen