enumbed
faculties and empty minds had two passions to stir their murky
depths--love for their religion, and hatred of England.

The first voice raised in support of the constitutional rights of
Ireland was that of William Molyneux, an Irish gentleman and scholar, a
philosopher, and the intimate friend of Locke. In the latter part of
the seventeenth century he issued a pamphlet which in the gentlest
terms called attention to the fact that the laws and liberties of
England which had been granted to Ireland five hundred years before had
been invaded, in that the rights of their Parliament, a body which
should be sacred and inviolable everywhere, had been abolished.
Nothing could have been milder than this {231} presentation of a
well-known fact; but it raised a furious storm. The constitutional
rights of Ireland! Was the man mad? The book was denounced in
Parliament as libellous and seditious, and was destroyed by the common
hangman. Then Dean Swift, half-Irishman and more than half-Englishman,
an ardent High-Churchman and a vehement anti-papist, published a
satirical pamphlet called "A Modest Proposal," in which he suggests
that the children of the Irish peasants should be reared for food, and
the choicest ones reserved for the landlords, who having already
devoured the substance of the fathers, had the best right to feast upon
their children. This was made the more pungent because it came from a
man who so far from being an Irish patriot, was an English Tory. He
cared little for Ireland or its people, but he hated tyranny and
injustice; and was stirred to a fierce wrath at what he himself
witnessed while Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Then it was
that with tremendous scorn he hurled those shafts of biting wit and
satire, which struck deeper than the cogent reasoning of the gentle and
philosophic Molyneux.

{232}

So the spell of silence was broken, and there began to form a small
patriotic party in Parliament, which in 1760 was led by Henry Flood,
from Kilkenny. A day was dawning after the long night; and when in
1775 Henry Grattan's more powerful personality was joined with Flood's,
then that brief day had reached its highest noon. Next to that of
Edmund Burke, Grattan's is the greatest name on the roll of native-born
Irishmen. Happy was that country in having such an advocate and guide
at the critical period when the American colonies were throwing off the
yoke of English tyranny. The wrongs