of
many restrictions on the commercial dealings of the colonies with
foreign countries and the reduction of many antiquated and embarrassing
import duties.

[Sidenote: 1770-1830--Daniel O'Connell]

Canning and Huskisson were always close friends and often ministerial
colleagues, and they two may be said to have led the way towards the
system of free trade to which the time had not yet come for Robert Peel
to give his complete adhesion. The great question of electoral reform
was coming up, and Charles Grey and Henry Brougham were among its most
conspicuous leaders. Canning did not take to Parliamentary reform,
although he was what might be described as an advanced Liberal on most
other questions of national importance. The Duke of Wellington was
strongly opposed to any proposals for a change in the Parliamentary
system, and this was one of the few great questions on which Canning
and he were in habitual agreement. Then there was the still more
pressing question of political equality for the Catholics of the three
kingdoms. Lord John Russell succeeded later on in carrying the repeal
of the Test and Corporation Acts which precluded Protestant Dissenters
from holding political or municipal office, but the attempt to obtain
the rights of equal citizenship for subjects of the King who belonged
{53} to the Church of Rome had to encounter much greater difficulties.

As might easily be expected, Ireland became the main battle-field of
this struggle. We have already recorded the fact that Pitt had been
greatly assisted in passing the Act of Union between Great Britain and
Ireland and abolishing Grattan's Parliament by the hopes which he held
out that the union of the legislatures would be followed by a complete
measure of Catholic emancipation. George the Third refused point-blank
to give his assent to any such measure, or even to listen to any
proposal for its introduction, declaring again and again that his
coronation oath absolutely forbade him to entertain an idea of the
kind. In the end, as we have seen, Pitt gave in and undertook never
again to worry the mind of his conscientious sovereign by any talk
about relief to George the Third's Roman Catholic subjects. But it
soon became evident that in this as in other instances the resolve of
the most headstrong monarch, and the promise of the most yielding Prime
Minister, cannot always induce a population to put up passively with a
manifest grievance. In Ireland, whe