.

The disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders and the
substitution of a ten-pound suffrage was the price to be paid for
catholic emancipation, and no time was lost in completing the bargain.
In days when it is assumed that every change in the electoral franchise
must needs be in a downward direction, it may well appear amazing that
so wholesale a destruction of privileges enjoyed for thirty-six years
should have provoked so feeble an opposition. It is still more amazing
that it should have passed without a protest from O'Connell himself, who
had solemnly vowed to perish on the field or on the scaffold rather than
submit to it. Yet so it was. These ignorant voters, it is true, had
never ventured to call their souls their own, and had only ceased to be
the servile creatures of their landlords in order to become the servile
creatures of their priests. Still, it was they who, by their action in
the Waterford and Clare elections, had forced the hand of the
government, and achieved catholic emancipation. It may safely be said
that after the reform act of 1832 it would have been politically
impossible to disfranchise them; and even in the unreformed parliament
it would have been scarcely possible if gratitude were a trustworthy
motive in politics. On the other hand, the government could never have
secured a majority for catholic emancipation, unless it had been
distinctly understood to carry with it the extinction of democracy in
Ireland. This, rather than declarations and restrictions of doubtful
efficacy, was the real "security" on which the legislature relied for
disarming the disloyalty of Irish catholics. For some time it answered
its purpose so far as to keep the representation of that disloyalty
within safe limits in the house of commons. But it naturally produced a
contrary effect in Ireland itself, and was destined to be swept away
before a fresh wave of agitation.

A few days before the relief bill passed the house of commons an episode
occurred which is chiefly interesting for the light which it throws on
the ideas then prevalent in the highest society. In 1828 Wellington had
presided at a meeting for the establishment of King's College, London,
an institution which was to be entirely under the influence of the
established church, and which was intended as a counterpoise to the
purely secular institution which had been recently founded under the
title of the "London University". The Earl of Winchilsea,