under the Great Seal of England, and that any proceedings of an Irish Parliament which had not been so certified and affirmed before that Parliament was assembled should be null and void.

The "Sixth of George I" called also "the Declaratory Act," was passed in the English Houses of Parliament in 1719, and "declared that the King, with the advice of the Lords and Commons of England hath had of right, and ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the people and the Kingdom of Ireland." It further took away from the Irish House of Lords its power of appellate jurisdiction.

In April, 1780, Grattan moved in the Irish House of Commons his "Declaration of Right." There were three resolutions contained in it, and on these was ultimately built the very shaky "Independence" with which his name is associated. They were:

(1) That His Most Excellent Majesty by and with the consent of the Lords and Commons of Ireland is the only power competent to enact laws to bind Ireland.

(2) That the Crown of Ireland is, and ought to be, inseparably annexed to the Crown of Great Britain.

(3) That Great Britain and Ireland are inseparably united under one Sovereign, by the common and indissoluble ties of interest, loyalty and freedom.

Though the stage had been carefully prepared, though the Volunteers were again mustered in the streets of Dublin, though the ladies thronged the galleries in their most bewitching gowns, and the orators of the Opposition had prepared their most eloquent speeches-it was all in vain. "Mr. Flood, who well knew that the ministerial members were committed to negative the motion if it came to a division, recommended that no question be put, and no appearance of the business entered in the journals, to which Mr. Grattan consented." It was a distinct set-back, not alone for Grattan, and for those politicians who thought with him, but for the Volunteers. Fortunately the latter saw the lesson to be learned from it, so they began not only improving and consolidating their organisation, but giving it a national extension by including the Catholics. Finally, feeling themselves able to speak at last for the whole Irish nation, they determined to make their voice heard above that of the corrupt Parliament. The expedient they adopted for this end was that of provincial conventions. The most famous of them was the Convention of the Ulster Volunteers, held in Dungannon on the 15th of February, 1782.

It was, however, when all is said and done, the progress of events in America which ultimately won a hearing for Grattan, when, in April, 1782, he moved an address to the King, asserting the principles already embodied in his "Declaration of Right.' On the 19th of October, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and not only the cause of American Independence, but that which Grattan called Irish "Independence" was won that day.

The Duke of Portland wrote:-"If you delay, or refuse to be liberal, Government cannot exist here in its present form, and the sooner you recall your Lieutenant and renounce all claim to this country, the better. But, on the contrary, if you can bring your minds to concede largely and handsomely, I am persuaded that you may make any use of this people, and of everything they are worth, that you can wish."

Lord Rockingham and his friends took the hint. They brought their minds to concede "largely and liberally"-that is to say all that was asked. A Bill repealing the Sixth of George I was introduced at once in the English Parliament and carried rapidly, and when the Irish Parliament met in May 27th, 1782, the Lord Lieutenant was instructed to announce to it that the King was prepared to give his unconditional assent "to Acts to prevent the suppressing of Bills in the Privy Council of this Kingdom, and the alteration of them anywhere, and to limit the duration of the Mutiny Act to two years.'

The following year, 1783, under pressure from the Volunteers and Flood a "Renunciation Bill" was carried through the British Parliament. It declared that the "right claim by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by His Majesty and the Parliament of that Kingdom in all cases whatever, and to have all actions and suits at law, or in equity, which may be instituted in the Kingdom, decided by His Majesty's courts therein finally, and without appeal from thence, shall be and is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable."

How England kept that promise we shall see.

MacNevin: History of the Volunteers of 1782.

Lecky: Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland.

History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. Davis: The Patriot Parliament.

Grattan's and Flood's Memoirs.

Sir Jonah Barrington: Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation.

CHAPTER LVII

THEOBALD WOLFE TONE

"I HAVE now seen the Parliament of Ireland, the Parliament of England, the Congress of the United States of America, the Corps Législatif of France and the Convention Batave; I have likewise seen our shabby Volunteer Convention in 1783, and the General Committee of the Catholics in 1793; so that I have seen, in the way of deliberative bodies as many I believe as most men; and of all those I have mentioned, beyond all comparison the most shamefully profligate and abandoned of all sense of virtue, principle, or even common decency, was the legislature of my own unfortunate country. The scoundrels! I lose my temper every time I think of them!"

The keen-faced young man in uniform of an Adjutant General of the French Army, whom we discover writing these angry words in his Journal on returning to his auberge from visiting to the Batavian Convention at the Hague in April, 1797, has every claim to have his opinion of the "Independent" Irish Parliament accepted as the ultimate verdict of the Irish people on that body. For he was the first to lay his fingers on what was really wrong with it— and to show the Irish people the way to remedy it.

This man was registered at his Dutch inn as "J. Smith, AdjutantGeneral of the Army of the Sambre and the Meuse." His true name, written in letters of undying light across the most memorable page of Irish History, was Theobald Wolfe Tone.

The earlier days, when, though "the untameable desire-to become a soldier," which was the dominant passion of his boyhood and young manhood, yet politics seemed the one career open to him. Young Counsellor Tone used to spend much of his, free time (which a slender law practice left him in abundance) in the galleries of the Irish House of Commons. There he speedily made the "Great Discovery," which was to influence not only the whole course of his own life, but the future direction of Irish History. Let us hear him state that discovery in his own words:

"That the influence of England was the radical vice of our Government, and that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous,

or happy, until she was independent, and that independence was unattainable whilst the connection with England existed."

Other people had felt long before this that the so-called "Independence" which Ireland had won from England in 1782, was not the genuine article, and that the "Independent" Irish Parliament was a libel on the name of free institutions. But until Tone presented a true diagnosis, these others, like unskilled physicians, went on applying remedies to the symptoms, and neglecting the root cause of the malady which laid waste the Irish Nation in sight of all men's eyes. And that root cause was the connection with England. The defect of the Constitution of 1782 was inherent in the clause that "united Great Britain and Ireland under one Sovereign," and "annexed the crown of Ireland inseparably to the crown of Great Britain."

It is perhaps not to be wondered at that those who had deliberately chosen this constitution were unable to perceive that it was wrong and unworkable from the start, and that its evils were inherent in its very essence. But it was hardly in action when they began to see that there was something the matter with it, and to look round for a remedy. They imagined if the machinery were improved it would function satisfactorily.

The two defects that struck everybody were:

First, that more than three-fourths of the Irish Nation were totally unrepresented in this "Irish" Parliament; for the Catholics, who made up more than three millions of the four, which then constituted the population of Ireland, could neither sit in it, nor vote for a member of it.

Second, that even as the instrument of the Protestant minority of the nation, it was hopelessly corrupt and unrepresentative. Of its 300 members, only 64 were returned by counties. The remaining 236 represented "rotten boroughs" (where there were sometimes as many as six voters, sometimes only one), and these boroughs were the property of certain peers and weathy commoners who trafficked in them most shamelessly. "The price of a seat in Parliament," said the Belfast Reformers in one of their petitions, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle in the fields." Of the

1 Lecky gives an idea of the tariff: "Borough seats were commonly sold for £2,000 a parliament; and the permanent patronage of a borough for from £8,000 to £10,000. In his examination before the Select Committee of the House of Commons (August. 1798) Arthur O'Connor quoted as the common talk of the House when he himself was a member: 'How much has such a one given for his seat? From whom did he purchase? Has not such a one sold his borough? Has not such a peer so many members in this house? Was not such a member with the Lord Lieutenant's Secretary to insist on some greater place or pension?"

total number of members more than a third were "placemen and pensioners" in the direct pay of the English Government.

The true effect of the so-called "grant of Independence" of 1782 has been admirably summed up by Arthur O'Connor. "What was called the emancipation of the Irish Legislature in 1782 was nothing more than freeing a set of self-constituted individuals from the absolute control of the British legislature, that they might be at liberty to sell themselves to the corrupt control of the British Ministry."

At first Grattan (who, though a brilliant orator and phrasemaker, was no statesman) was so delighted with his new toy, that he could not bear to have it touched or criticised. He accordingly set himself strenuously against the continuance of the Volunteers, who under the leadership of Flood, were pressing for the reform of the Parliament. A great national Convention of the Volunteers summoned to Dublin for December, 1783, was split on the Catholic question, boycotted by Grattan, and so "nobbled" by his friend, Lord Charlemont, that it dispersed "re infecta"; and it seemed for a moment that the Volunteers, as an effective force in Irish public life, had absolutely disappeared.

The truth was that they were eclipsed for a time, only to emerge from a temporary obscuring in the form of the United Irishmen.

Up in his place in the gallery of the "House" in College Green, Theobald Wolfe Tone had at length got his own political theory clear. "To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country, these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter-these were my means.2

Absolute freedom from England and no absurd theory of "Sister Kingdoms united by the golden circle of the crown," of "colonial" independence-absolute union among Irishmen, and no cutting off of "Pales" or reserved territories-such was the solution of the "Irish Problem" which presented itself to Theobald Wolfe Tone a hundred and thirty years ago.

Our Theobald had his theory well defined, when on a memorable day he turned from the contemplation of the antics of the

2 Padraic Pearse considered the whole Gospel of Irish Nationality as contained in these words, which he paraphrases, "I believe in an Irish Nation and that free and indivisible."