forms, and energetically agitated for the repeal of the Union.

In addition, however, to these personal considerations there is one of another kind which may be urged in explanation and palliation of O'Connell's proceedings after 1829, and which has not, I think, been sufficiently considered in England. The mass of the Irish Catholics had been brought to a state of frenzied excitement which was in the highest degree dangerous and extremely likely to break out into armed rebellion. All the confidential correspondence of the Government as well as the language of independent writers attests the fact. Greville, describing the situation, says that O'Connell believed that he could keep the country quiet for another year, but that Dr. Doyle, the ablest of the Catholic bishops, feared and believed that this was impossible. The prevailing feeling of the great ignorant masses in Ireland was undoubtedly that the victory they had achieved was only the forerunner of an armed rebellion which was to break down English dominion in Ireland. The constant question, it was noticed, among them was, 'When will the Counsellor call us out?' Whatever may be said in other respects against O'Connell, two things were always among the foremost objects of his life. One was to convince his fellowcountrymen of the folly and the criminality of secret illegal associations and agrarian crimes. The other was to prevent the political movement from degenerating into armed rebellion. His power of restraining the people was truly wonderful, more wonderful even than his power of exciting them, but he restrained them by flattering them, by humouring them, by using the kind of inflammatory language they liked; by often yielding to their pressure. If in this moment of fierce passion and on the morrow of a

1 O'Neill Daunt's Recollections, ii. 137.

CATHOLIC DISQUALIFICATIONS CONTINUED

99

great triumph, which had not been conceded to argument, but wrung by popular pressure from a hostile ministry which was still in power, he had adopted a quiescent or passive or temporising policy, is it likely that he would have retained his power of control? Is it not probable that other and more violent men would have taken his place, and that instead of a repeal agitation Ireland would have drifted into another rebellion ?

Altogether apart from the repeal question, there were grievances which a fervent Catholic whose great object was to break down Protestant ascendency, and who found himself the master of a political organisation of tremendous power, could not possibly have neglected. The Irish system of tithes and the Vestry Act, which enabled Protestants to tax Catholics for the repair of Protestant churches, were the most prominent; and, beside these, there was much to be objected to in the agrarian laws and in the exclusively Protestant administration of justice. O'Connell always attached the highest importance to questions of patronage, maintaining that in Ireland the laws themselves were less important than the spirit in which they were administered. In scarcely one year since the Union had Ireland been governed by ordinary law.1 The Habeas Corpus Act, which is perhaps the most important part of the British Constitution, was suspended in Ireland in 1800, from 1802 to 1805, from 1807 till 1810, in 1814, from 1822 to 1824.2 In 1833, four years after Catholic Emancipation, there was not in Ireland a single Catholic judge or stipendiary magistrate. All the high sheriffs, with one exception, the overwhelming majority of the unpaid magistrates and of the grand jurors, the five inspectors-general, and the thirty-two inspectors of police

were Protestants, while the chief towns were in the hands of narrow, corrupt, and, for the most part, intensely bigoted corporations. The reform of the grand jury system and of municipal government were among the objects O'Connell specially desired.

6

In his address to the electors of Clare when he went to the county for re-election a long list was given of the objects he undertook to achieve if sent into Parliament. It was nicknamed the address of the hundred promises,' and in the first draft he announced his intention to start at once an agitation for the repeal of the Union. With great difficulty, and on the earnest entreaty of some of the most important supporters of the Catholic cause, and especially of Lord Anglesey, he was induced to suppress this clause, but his intention remained unchanged. It was, as we have already seen, one of his earliest dreams, and even in the very height of the emancipation struggle he had clearly contemplated it. In 1828 he wrote to Lord Cloncurry that repeal must soon be the object.1 In one of the last speeches he made in the Catholic Association he predicted that the repeal of oppressive laws against religion would be followed by an amalgamation of all sects and denominations in Ireland, and added that without such amalgamation we never can procure the repeal of that odious and abominable measure, the Union.' As late as January 1829 he declared that in order to accomplish repeal he would give up emancipation itself, and that he expected in such a struggle to meet with the co-operation of all sects and parties. If the people will keep quiet,' he wrote in 1830, and allow me to regulate, I think I am certain of procuring the repeal of the Union.' It was his favourite hope that he would win the great body of Irish

• Ibid.

RISE OF THE REPEAL AGITATION

101

Protestants to join with him in the new cry, and that its object might be achieved without violence or disturbance. 'We never,' he wrote, 'can repeal the Union, which every day becomes more and more pressing, except by keeping clear of any illegality whatsoever.'1

He sometimes spoke as if he was pushed on irresistibly by the popular feeling behind him. He described himself as a straw floating on a stream which indicated but did not make the current. 'Believe me,' he said, 'there is an under-swell in the Irish people which is much more formidable than any sudden or showy exhibition of irritation.' But the truth is that he was pressing on the agitation with all his power. 'This,' he wrote, 'is emphatically the moment to get as many places as possible to petition for the repeal of the Union.' If O'Connell had not raised the cry of repeal it is probable that it would never have become formidable, though it is also true, as O'Connell clearly saw, that with the exception of the abolition of tithes this was the one question on which the great mass of the people could be speedily and genuinely aroused— the one chord that would be responded to through the length and breadth of Catholic Ireland.

He had, however, abundant evidence that a movement for repeal would be of a very different kind from a struggle for Catholic Emancipation. In that struggle the Catholics could count on the general support of the whole body of the English Whigs, of a considerable section of the English Tories, including, as Sir Robert Peel noticed, most of the rising men of ability, and also of a large and perhaps preponderating section of the English press, but all classes of Englishmen of any weight saw in the repeal movement a movement for the disruption of the Empire, and the struggle for repeal would naturally divide the two islands 1 Fitzpatrick, i. 272.

2 Ibid. i. 229.

and throw the whole popular sentiment of Ireland in opposition to England. To the Whig party, who had for long years sacrificed power and influence for the Catholic cause, nothing could be more mortifying. They had steadily maintained that the admission of Catholics to Parliament would be at once a just, safe, and moderate measure, which would pacify Ireland and strengthen and consolidate the Empire. They now found it made the starting-point of a new and far more dangerous agitation for breaking up the Imperial Parliament. Nor were the effects on the internal condition of Ireland likely to be less serious. By an inversion of parties, which seems at first sight strange, but which was in truth very natural, nearly all those who had most strenuously opposed the Union when it was originally carried were equally strenuous opponents of repeal. The Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, was something like an enlarged grand jury, or like the present Synod of the disestablished Church. It represented in the highest degree the property, and especially the landed property, as well as the intelligence of the country. It placed the management of Irish affairs in the hands of the Irish aristocracy and resident landlords, with a large admixture of the leading Protestant lawyers; but their power was qualified by an inordinate number of nomination boroughs directly or indirectly under Government control.

There was no inconsistency in maintaining that in the peculiar condition of Ireland such a Parliament was, or might be made, a very efficient instrument of government, while a purely democratic Parliament in which the poorest and most ignorant Roman Catholics would have an overwhelming power, and which would certainly be governed for some years by a statesman who advocated manhood suffrage and vote by ballot, would be ruinous to

1