before the Union, and became of a less satisfactory character for the imports consisted yearly more of manufactured goods, the exports of raw material.

The other important articles of the Union were the fourth, regulating the parliamentary representation of Ireland, and the fifth, providing for the eternal duration of the Established Church.

By the fourth article it was provided that four lords spiritual of Ireland, by rotation of sessions, and twenty-eight lords temporal, elected for life by the peers of Ireland, shall sit and vote in the House of Lords; that the non-representative peers shall be eligible to sit for any constituency of the United Kingdom in the House of Commons; and that not more than one Irish peerage shall be created for every three that become extinct. This article also fixes the representation of Ireland in the House of Commons at one hundred members, at which figure it has practically remained throughout the eighty-five years of Union, though the principles of proportional representation would have allowed Ireland over two hundred representatives in 1845, and now entitle her to not more than ninety-one. The fifth article enjoins "that the churches of England and Ireland, as by law established, be united. into one Protestant Episcopal Church, to be called The United Church of England and Ireland, and that the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the United Church shall remain in full force for ever, as the same are now by law established for the Church of England, and that the continuance and preservation of the United Church as the Established Church of England and Ireland shall be deemed, and taken to be an essential and fundamental part of the Union." This clause formed the great, and, indeed, the sole argument in favor of retaining the Establishment in Ireland.

The remaining articles provide for the succession of the sovereign and the maintenance of the laws. On New-Year's Day, 1801, the Union practically commenced, and at the assembling of the first united Parliament on January 22d the Catholics looked for speedy measures of relief. But the Catholic claims were not so much as mentioned in the king's speech, and his majesty having declared that he would abdicate rather than consent to Catholic emancipation, Pitt resigned into the hands

of the anti-Catholic Abingdon. The hopes of the Catholics were dashed; five of the ministers reported to be in favor of the measure proved to be against it, and Pitt, though he professedly resigned on this question, resigned into the hands of a man whom he knew to be against emancipation, and resigned at a moment when the failure of his continental policy rendered his position as prime minister a painful one. He was probably glad to leave to others the task of making and breaking the Treaty of Amiens, and at least his resignation cannot be put down to devotion to the Catholics, for, when he resumed office in 1804, he gave a pledge to the king never again to trouble him with the subject.

When the claims of the Catholics were thrown over, Cornwallis gladly resigned the viceroyalty, and betook himself to the more congenial task of negotiating the Peace of Amiens. At its conclusion in June, 1802, the state prisoners were released from Fort George, and a new council of United Irishmen was established in Brussels. Unable themselves to return to Ireland, the United Irishmen sent over as an emissary young Robert Emmet, who was then in his three-and-twentieth year. The young man arrived in Dublin in the October of 1802, and spent the winter in organizing and preparing for rebellion. The moment was almost as unfavorable as any that could have been chosen; the memory of '98 was still green, and England on the alert; the best of the Separatists were all out of the country, and the revolutionary party were without funds.

His rebellion was worse than a failure, it was a collapse; but his plan of securing the capital and holding it as a rebel fortress is the only one which could have even the remotest chance of success in a country whose centre is one vast plain. But after eight months' diligent organization Emmet was followed into the streets by an army of only eighty persons, and his attempt ended in nothing nobler than the brutal murder of Lord Kilwarden, and his nephew, a clergyman. An hour later the streets of Dublin had returned to their usual quiet, and Emmet, heart-sick, disillusionized, and convinced of the utter hopelessness of the struggle, hurried to the Wicklow hills to prevent a country rising. He might even yet have escaped, but he had resolved to see one person before leaving the country. He could not go without a word to Sarah Curran, the young

est daughter of the great advocate, John Philipot Curran, who, at all risks to his life and professional reputation, had undertaken the defence of the rebels of '98. But the meeting between Miss Curran and Emmet never took place; while he was still waiting, he was seized and taken to Dublin.

The story of the clandestine engagement then came to Curran's ears, and he, unable to forgive the secrecy and the injury that this connection was to his reputation as a loyal man, refused to defend his daughter's lover. Emmet lost nothing by this refusal; the result of the trial was a foregone conclusion; hundreds of blunderbusses, and thousands of pikes had been discovered in Emmet's arsenal, and with them were some thousand printed placards to be issued by the republican government to the people of Ireland. The evidence against Emmet was complete, and if anything could have saved him, his youth, the manly gentleness of his countenance, and his own marvellous eloquence, would have been his best advocates. On the 19th of September he was led in irons to the dock; by midnight the verdict was obtained, and in the afternoon of the next day he was hanged in Thomas Street, within view of his arsenal. "All that I crave of the world," said dying Emmet, "is the charity of its silence; let no man write my epitaph," but by friend and foe alike that request has been denied, and the nameless stone in St. Michan's churchyard alone is faithful to the wish of the dead patriot.

The utter collapse of a rebellion organized by a leader of such exceptional enthusiasm and personal charm was proof that in 1803 there was wonderful little tendency to rebellion in Ireland; but the renewal of the continental war increased the dread of a French invasion, and the miserable rising of eighty persons was punished by the imprisonment of three hundred, and the death of nineteen. Martial law was proclaimed, the Habeas Corpus Act suspended, and the whole yeomanry of Ireland put on permanent duty, at a cost of £100,000 monthly.

The rising, abortive as it had been, threw back the anti-union party; in the horror and terror of the time Home Rule and Separation were deemed equally disloyal, and any demand for repeal raised a cry of disintegration of the empire. "Do not unite with us, sir," said Samuel Johnson to an Irish friend; "we would unite with you only to rob you;" and in the early years of the century there was a

very general impression in Ireland that the union had indeed been, as Byron called it, "The union of the shark with its prey." The continental war gave artificial stimulus to agriculture both in England and Ireland, but by the end of 1804 the Irish national debt had risen to .fifty-three millions-a rise of twenty-six millions in four years, while in the same time the net produce of the revenue had actually decreased, despite the increasing population. The prosperity of the towns began to flag at The removal of the parliament ruined Dublin, which, from a metropolis, sank in a few years to the condition of a second-rate provincial city.

once.

The common dislike to the Union drew all parties together; Protestant, Catholic, Whig, and Tory united in the wish for repeal, but while the French scare continued agitation seemed hopeless, and the Catholics set themselves to gain first the lesser, but more attainable, boon of emancipation.

In 1804 Pitt resumed office, and the Catholics, ignorant of his pledge to the king, asked him to present their petition for emancipation. He was, of course, unable to do this, and on March 25th of the following year the petition was presented by Fox in the Commons and Grenville in the Lords. During the debate that ensued, it was proposed to place the Roman Church on the same footing as the Gallican, by allowing the sovereign a right of veto on the prelates appointed by the pope, and thus arose the famous question of veto, which was destined to be so bitterly debated before the emancipation question was settled. It was during this debate that Grattan made his first speech in the united Parliament, and to this cause he devoted the remainder of his life. The bill was thrown out by a majority of nearly three to one, and when, after the death of Pitt in the following January, the Grenville-Fox ministry was formed, Fox advised the Catholics to let their claims stand over till the next session. So far as Fox was concerned, that next session was never held, for on the 13th of September he died. At his accession to office the hopes of the Catholics and anti-unionists had been high; the act for the suspension of the habeas corpus was allowed to expire, and for a time Ireland was governed by ordinary legislation. The death of the minister dashed these high hopes; and in the next session it was not even proposed to bring forward an Emancipation Bill, though, as a soothing measure,

an act to enable Catholics to hold commissions in the army and navy was introduced; but so invincible was the king's opposition to this concession that the ministers were forced to resign, and the "No Popery" cabinet was formed. The Duke of Bedford was now recalled, and the Duke of Richmond succeeded him as viceroy, with Sir Arthur Wellesley, afterward Duke of Wellington, as chief secretary. In this year, for the first time since the Union, there was a renewal of Whiteboyism, the objects of the Whiteboys being the usual ones of reduction of rents, security of tenure, increase of laborers' wages, and resistance to tithe. The organization was confined to a small part of the country, and was quickly suppressed by ordinary law, but so great was the dread of a French party that the whole country was placed under an Insurrection Act and an Arms Act.

Notwithstanding the known views of the cabinet, the Catholics continued to urge their claims, and in 1808 Grattan presented a petition for emancipation accompanied by veto. The measure was thrown out, to the content of most parties, for the Catholic prelates unanimously declared that they preferred the existing state of affairs to emancipation with veto.

Two years later the measure was again brought forward, and, as a set-off to the veto, the state payment of the Catholic clergy was proposed, but despite the temptation that this must have offered to so poor a body of men, the clergy declared against the measure, and the body of the Irish Catholic laity went with them. The English Catholics, some few of the Irish Catholic nobility and upper class, and the Irish Protestant advocates of emancipation favored the scheme, but the vast majority were against it. In this year Daniel O'Connell was elected chairman of the Catholic committee, and from this time he became the acknowledged leader of the Catholics.

O'Connell was born on the 6th of August, 1775, "the very year," as he himself says, in a letter to the Dublin Evening Post, "in which the stupid obstinacy of British oppression forced the reluctant. people of America to seek for security in arms, and to commence that bloody struggle for national independence, which has been in its results beneficial to England, whilst it has shed glory, and conferred liberty, pure and sublime, on America." He was educated at St. Omers, and it is said manifested

some inclination for the priesthood; but there can be no doubt that his vocation lay in another direction, as he was incomparably too deeply religious and too thoroughly honest not to have obeyed the call of God at any cost, had such a favor been vouchsafed to him. It is said, whatever his dislike of physical force may have been in after-life, that he unquestionably knew how to use the argumentum baculinum in his early days; and that more than one student was made to feel the effects thereof, when attempting ill-natured jokes on the herculean Celt. During his residence abroad he had some opportunities of witnessing the fearful effects of the French Revolution; and it is probable that a remembrance of these scenes, added to his own admirably keen common sense, saved him from leading his countrymen on to deeds of open violence. He was called to the Irish bar in the memorable year of 1798. For some time he failed to obtain practice; for who would confide their case to a young Catholic lawyer, when the fact of his creed alone would be sufficient to condemn his client in the eyes of Protestant juries, judges, and attorneys? His maiden speech was made in opposition to the Union, even as his life was spent in the most strenuous efforts to obtain the reversal of that most fatal measure. A meeting was held in the Royal Exchange, Dublin, at the close of the year 1799, to petition against it; but even as O'Connell was denouncing, in his most eloquent language, the new attempt at national degradation, Major Sirr and his file of military rushed into the apartment, and separated the assembly. O'Connell now retired into private life, and, with the marvellous foresight of true genius, devoted himself to storing up that forensic knowledge which he felt sure he should one day use for the benefit of his countrymen.

O'Connell was now thirty-five years of age, and had already attained considerable reputation at the Irish bar. He had joined the Catholic committee in 1806, and at an earlier date had made speeches in favor of repeal. In 1810 a Repeal Association was formed, and had O'Connell thrown his energies into that channel it might possibly have fallen to the lot of the Irish, not the united, Parliament to emancipate the Catholics. But O'Connell believed that in the House of Commons the Irish Catholics would best plead the cause of repeal; and, being himself a Catholic, he felt the political degradation

of the mass of his countrymen very keenly. The veto agitation broke up the Catholics into two parties, and the movement seemed doomed to collapse till 1823, when O'Connell, taking advantage of some revival of interest, founded the Catholic Association.

The history of Ireland in the years between 1810 and 1823 is mainly agrarian; the Catholic agitation was continued, and various Emancipation Bills were brought in and rejected-Grattan making his last effort in 1813, six years before his death; but until 1823 the cry for emancipation did not amount to a national demand.

After holding the chief secretaryship for a few months only, Arthur Wellesley resigned it to his brother, Sir Wellesley Pole, who was succeeded by Sir Robert Peel on the formation of the LiverpoolCastlereagh ministry in 1812. Peel's Irish politics are briefly summed up in his nick-name, "Orange Peel;" he was intensely unpopular, being too temporizing for his own party and too exacting for the emancipationists. During his tenure of office the long continental war came to an end, and with the peace came a rapid fall in the price of agricultural produce. In England there were two interestswhat the land interest lost the trade interest gained by the cheap prices; but in Ireland, where there was no trade, the fall in prices was an unmixed evil. To bolster up the agricultural interest in both countries, Corn Laws were passed prohibiting the importation of wheat till home-grown grain should have reached the price of 80s. per quarter. This act remained in force till 1828, when "the sliding scale" was introduced, allowing the importation of wheat on payment of a sliding scale of duty, which varied from £1 5s. 8d. per quarter when the average English price was under 62s., to 1s. per quarter when home-grown grain was above 738. But notwithstanding this protective duty the peace brought great distress to Ireland, and distress was followed by agrarian outrage. An Insurrection Act was immediately passed and martial law proclaimed, but this measure had no effect on the starving peasantry, and the southern provinces remained practically in revolt against the landlords and tithe proctors. The reduction of prices had been followed by no reduction of rent, and in 1819 the failure of the potato crop changed pinching distress to absolute famine. The Coercion Act was renewed, but was

ineffectual, and the operation of an act which had been passed two years earlier lessening the cost of evictions had no better result.

In 1822 the potato crop again failed, and to a more disastrous extent. There was grain in abundance, but the peasantry could not afford to buy it. Thousands of quarters of grain were exported weekly to England; while so great was the scarcity in Connemara that half-starved wretches walked fifty miles into Galway in the wild hope of food, but when they arrived in the city they were often so exhausted that they fainted, and the means taken to restore them failed in effect. In the month of June there were 99,639 souls in the County Clare alone living on daily charity, and in Cork there were 122,000; while in some of the remoter villages the whole population died of sheer starvation. Through all this distress the middleman or landlord and the tithe proctor had to be paid, and to the unreasonableness of their claims, and their severity in extorting them, those living on the spot, and best competent to judge, attributed the agrarian outrages.

The year 1823 marks an era in the history of Catholic emancipation, for in it O'Connell, aided by Shiel, formed the Catholic Association for the furtherance of the cause of emancipation by means of petitions, public discussions, meetings, and the return of members of Parliament, who were pledged to support the cause. The association, like its numerous successors, consisted of members paying an annual subscription of £1 1s., and associates who paid one shilling. A standing committee formed the government; meetings were held weekly, and the business consisted of organization, discussion, correspondence, and petitions. At first it was difficult to keep the infant association alive, and at one of the early meetings O'Connell had to entreat two Maynooth students who were passing the committee rooms, to come in and form a quorum. It was a fortunate accident; from that hour the clergy gave the association their support. The association, once rooted, spread like a fire, and in the next year the "Catholic rent," consisting of one penny monthly, averaged £500 ($2,500) a week, representing nearly a half a million associates. The era for emancipation had become a national demand, and there was a strong feeling in England that it ought not to be resisted, though George IV. regarded the project almost as unfavorably as his father had done. In

March, 1825, the association was dissolved by act of Parliament, but O'Connell, who boasted that he "could drive a coach and six through any act of Parliament," circumvented the act, and re-organized the association under the name of the New Catholic Association, and the government took no further means to suppress the society, for at that moment they were constructing a Catholic Relief Bill granting emancipation, but weighting the measure by the disfranchisement of the fortyshilling freeholders, and the state payment of the Catholic clergy. In this form the bill was unpopular in Ireland, and the news that it had been thrown out by the lords was received with pleasure rather than disappointment. The proposal for the state payment of the clergy was held both by priesthood and laity to be nothing better than a bribe, and the forty-shilling freeholders, who were the great bulk of the rural voters, hotly resented the prospect of disfranchisement. During the next three years the vigorous and ever-increasing efforts of the Catholics were unavailing; in 1827 Canning died, and early in the ensuing year the Duke of Wellington became premier, and Peel home secretary. Yet this anti-Catholic administration was destined to carry the Catholic Relief Bill, not from any conversion to the principles of religious equality, but, as the premier himself stated, "to prevent civil war." While the Emancipation Bill was being framed, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald, member for Clare, accepted the office of president of the board of trade, and had to present himself for re-election. To the surprise of everyone O'Connell announced his intention of contesting the seat, for though the nature of the oath of allegiance was such that no Catholic could swear it, there was no law to prevent the election of a Papist. The contest was a hot one, and O'Connell was successful, but as the Emancipation Bill was in progress he did not attempt to take his seat till it had been through the House. In the next session it passed, but at the same time the county franchise in Ireland was raised from forty shillings to ten pounds-five times that of England, where the franchise remained unchanged. As the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders was for many years a standing grievance, it will be well to briefly state the facts of the case.

In 1795 a bill had been passed giving the elective franchise to all lease holders of property to the an

nual value of forty shillings. This bill had made Irish landlords very willing to grant small leases, and a whole race of peasant farmers had sprung up. The population had increased rapidly, and in 1821 amounted to nearly 7,000,000. At the fall in prices at the peace of 1815, the cry of over-population of Ireland had first been raised, and the famines of '19 and '22 had confirmed English statesmen in their theory; and it was professedly as a check to the too rapid increase of population that the franchise was raised from two to ten pounds. But, whether for good or evil, the deed was done; the population was there, and the disfranchisement brought an infinity of misery. Such landlords as cared for political power, and looked on their tenants only as voters, refused to renew small leases, and at their expiration ejected the small tenants to bring the value of the leaseholds of such as remained up to the county qualification. The cheap Ejectment Acts that had been passed after the peace of 1815 greatly simplified the process of eviction, and in Ireland a tenant could be evicted in two months and at a cost of £2, while in England the process took at least twelve months and cost £18. The Irish landlord, too, could distrain the young crops of the tenant, keep them till they were ripe, gather and sell them, charging the tenant with the accumulation of the expense.

After the disfranchisement these acts were largely used, and many landlords who did not evict refused to renew small leases, and so the system of annual tenancy increased. It is difficult to conceive what can be said in favor of this system of tenure so ruinous to the cultivator and the soil. The tenant, dreading eviction, fearing that his rent may be raised on the value of the improvements he has made, and unwilling to risk his capital, stints his manure and contents himself with scratching over the surface of the soil, growing potatoes and oats, oats and potatoes, till the impoverished land refuses to yield enough to support life, much less pay the rent; then follows the familiar, miserable story of eviction, starvation, and crime.

By the raising of the franchise, the electors of Ireland were reduced from 200,000 to 26,000, that is to say, nearly seven out of every eight electors were disqualified. Twenty-one years later a Reform Act was passed establishing a £5 freehold and £12 rating occupation franchise for the counties, and an