acknowledgment of Irish
nationality, the beginning of a great work was accomplished; but its
final consummation, though rendered practicable and even easy, depended
wholly on the continuing good intention of the British Cabinet. The
Acts of 1782 and 1783 required a supplemental arrangement, to obviate
those secondary difficulties in the working of the two Legislatures,
which supplied Mr. Pitt with his main parliamentary plea for the Union.
What was yet more important was the completion of the scheme in Ireland
itself. And this under three great heads: (1) The purification of
Parliament by a large measure of reform; (2) the abolition of all Roman
Catholic disabilities; (3) the establishment of a proper relation
between the Legislative and the Executive powers. It is often urged,
with cynical disregard to justice and reason, that with the Grattan
Parliament we had corruption, coercion, discontent, and finally
rebellion. But the political mischiefs, which disfigure the brief life
of the Grattan Parliament, and the failure to obtain the two first of
the three great purposes I have named, were all in the main due to the
third grand flaw in the Irish case after 1782. I mean the false
position, and usually mischievous character, of the Irish Executive,
which, with its army of placemen and expectants in Parliament, was
commonly absolute master of the situation. Well does Mr. Swift
MacNeill,[97] in his very useful work, quote the words of Mr. Fox in
1797: "The advantages, which the form of a free Government seemed to
promise, have been counteracted by the influence of the Executive
Government, and of the British Cabinet."

There were five Viceroys between 1782 and 1790. Then came a sixth, Lord
Westmoreland, the worst of them all, whose political judgment was on a
par with his knowledge of the English language.[98] The great settlement
of 1782-3 was in the main worked by men who were radically adverse to
its spirit and intention. But they were omnipotent in their control of
the unreformed. Parliament of Ireland, more and more drenched, under
their unceasing and pestilent activity, with fresh doses of corruption.
Westmoreland and his myrmidons actually persuaded Pitt, in 1792, that
Irish Protestantism and its Parliament were unconquerably adverse to the
admission of Roman Catholics to the franchise; but when the proposal was
made from the Throne in 1793, notwithstanding the latent hostility of
the Castle, the Parliament passed th