HOME RULE IN HISTORY[ToC]
Grattan's Parliament was the first Parliament with full legislative authority possessed by Ireland since the time of Henry VII. It existed for nearly twenty years, and in that brief time it did a great work for Ireland. If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough, in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament with his venomous hate, and finally compassed its doom—the famous Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:—
"There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as Ireland."[65]
But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by experience. One was that although the Irish Parliament obtained the right of legislation, the appointment of the Government and the Executive was still placed in the hands of the Irish Privy Council, and therefore of the British Central Government. That meant, in the end, that the British Government still possessed the leverage for recovering the powers of legislative initiative and legislative veto.
As far as Ireland possessed separate executive powers, she used them with loyalty and patriotism. Take, for instance, her finance. Ireland possessed, under the settlement, a separate Irish Exchequer, and the British Government could levy no war taxes in Ireland, except with the consent of the Irish Parliament. That gave to the Irish Parliament an immense power of checking and hampering England in her struggle against Napoleon. If we were to judge from some of the talk heard at the present moment, one would take for granted that Ireland must have refused all help to England in that struggle.
On the contrary, the Irish Parliament voted sums freely to Pitt for the wars against France. The Irish statesmen would have no dealings with the English Whigs in their pro-French policy. Like that other great Irishman, Edmund Burke, Grattan was opposed to the spirit of the French Revolution. In that great European crisis Ireland showed herself what she really is—a nation inclined in all essentials to conservative rather than revolutionary ideas.
"CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION"
But it was the existence of a separate external executive, gradually limiting the legislative powers of the Irish Parliament, that finally brought out the gravity of the other signal defect in the settlement of 1782. That defect was the failure to effect a complete settlement of the Catholic question. For the Irish Parliament, even after 1782, was still confined to Protestants. Could any reasonable man call that a final solution of the problem of government in a country where four-fifths of the people were Catholics? With a truer foresight than Grattan, Flood desired that the Volunteers should refuse to lay down their arms until the Catholic question had been settled. But Grattan, still filled with that spirit of generous trust which has been the undoing of so many noble Irishmen, refused to use the military power for any further exaction of terms. He disbanded the Volunteers.
Grattan trusted that once the Irish Parliament was endowed with full powers, the Catholic question would settle itself. He could rely with certainty on his own Protestant followers. He persuaded them to repeal the penal laws. He prevailed upon them to extend the franchise to the Catholic peasant. Both those great reforms were passed through the Irish Parliament in the fulness of its strength and power, and the British Government were compelled to acquiesce. But there Grattan reached the limit of his authority. There was one more great step which had to be taken before the Catholic claims could be satisfied. It was necessary to concede the right to a Catholic, as to a Protestant, to sit in the Irish Parliament. When Grattan made that proposal, he found himself faced with new forces. The British Government and the Ascendancy Party in Ireland had already begun to regain their hold over the Irish Parliament. The forces of patronage and corruption were already at work.
If those had been the only powers Grattan might have defeated them. Neither he nor his admirers were perhaps wholly aware of what we now know to be the centre of this resistance—the dogged, almost insane, obstinacy of George III. Pitt indeed had already lost his earlier reforming zeal. The shadow of the French struggle had already fallen across his path, and had already shaken his early faith in freedom and progress. But if Pitt had been left alone he might still have done justice. It was George III. that lost us the soul of Ireland, as he lost us both the body and soul of North America.