s leaders too severely. A nation which has been
long kept in bondage, and is suddenly presented with liberty, is hardly
more able to bear the change than a man immured for years in a dark
dungeon can at once endure the unveiled light of the sun; and
independence had been granted to the Irish too suddenly for it to be
probable that they would at once and in every instance exercise it
wisely.

All parties were to blame in different degrees. The first danger came
from the Volunteers, who, flushed with self-importance, from the belief
that it was the imposing show of their strength which had enabled the
Parliament to extort Lord Rockingham's concession from the English
Houses, now claimed to be masters of the Parliament itself. With the
termination of the American war, and the consequent return of the
English army to Europe, the reason for their existence had passed away.
But they refused to be disbanded, and established a convention of armed
delegates, to sit in Dublin during the session of Parliament, and to
overawe the Houses into passing a series of measures which they
prescribed, and which included a Parliamentary Reform Bill of a most
sweeping character. On this occasion, however, the House of Commons
acted with laudable firmness. Led by Mr. Fitzgibbon, a man of great
powers, and above all suspicion of corruptibility, it spurned the
dictation of an unauthorized body, and rejected the Reform Bill,
avowedly on the ground of its being presented to it "under the mandate
of a military congress;" and the Convention, finding itself powerless to
enforce its mandates, dissolved.

But the difficulties of the government were not over with the
suppression of the Volunteer Convention. The Lord-lieutenant had a
harder, because a more enduring, contest to encounter with the
Parliament and the patrons of the boroughs. A single act of Parliament
may substitute a new law for an old one; but no one resolution or bill
has a magical power to extinguish long habits of jobbery and corruption.
Members and patrons alike seemed to regard the late concessions as
chiefly valuable on account of the increased value which it enabled them
to place on their services to the government; and one cannot read
without a feeling of shame that one or two of the bishops who were wont
to be regarded as the proprietors of the seats for their diocesan
cities, were not behind the most nameless lay boroughmongers in the
resolution they evinced make a market of t