In February, 1782, Grattan again brought forward a motion to declare the independence of the Irish Legislature, and again it was thrown out. The Dungannon resolution was then introduced, and it was proposed to abolish all distinctions between Protestants and Catholics. But to this the most serious objections were raised, and it was found necessary to make concessions to Protestant bigotry. The Catholics were permitted to acquire freehold property, to buy and sell, bequeath and inherit; but the penal laws which bore upon their religion, and their right to educate their children at home or abroad, as well as those which excluded them from political life, were left on the statute-book. Fanaticism was stronger than patriotism, and the enthusiastic love of liberty was again found to be compatible with the love of persecution and oppression. But this injustice in no way dampened the ardor of the Catholics for the national independence; and when, on the 16th of April, 1782, Grattan moved a Declaration of Rights, inspired probably by our own Declaration of Independence, he was greeted with as wild a tumult of applause by the Catholics as by his Protestant countrymen. “I found Ireland,” he said, “on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a nation. In that new character I hail her, and, bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto Perpetua!”
The overwhelming popular enthusiasm bore everything with it, and opposition was useless. “It is no longer,” wrote the Duke of Portland, the viceroy, “the Parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to; it is the whole of this country.”
In England the Whigs, who were in power, felt how hopeless would be any efforts to stem the torrent, and they therefore yielded with grace. Fox admitted that Ireland had a right to distrust British legislation “because it had hitherto been employed only to oppress and distress her.” Ireland had been wronged, and it was but just that concessions should now be made to her. The day of deliverance had come, and, amidst an outburst of universal enthusiasm, Ireland’s independence was proclaimed.
The Catholics were the first to feel the benefits of this victory. The two Relief Bills, introduced into Parliament in their favor, were carried. They were permitted to open schools and educate their own children; their stables were no longer subject to inspection, or their horses above the value of five pounds liable to be seized by the government or taken from them by Protestant informers; and their right to freedom of religious worship was fully recognized. They recovered, in a word, their civil rights; but the law still excluded them from any participation in the political life of the country, and they were still forbidden to possess arms. Nevertheless, another step towards Catholic emancipation had been taken. Two other laws, beneficial to all classes of citizens, but especially favorable to the poor and oppressed Catholics, date from this time: the Habeas Corpus Act was granted to Ireland, and the tenure of judges was placed on the English level.
Unfortunately, the social condition of the country was so deplorable that this improvement in the laws conferred few or no benefits upon the impoverished and downtrodden people. But at least there was some gain; for if good laws do not necessarily make a people prosperous, bad laws necessarily keep them in misery. The landed gentry and Protestant clergy continued without shame to neglect all the duties which they owed to their tenants, whose wretchedness increased as the fortunes of Ireland seemed to rise. To maintain the Volunteers the rents were raised, and the poor peasants, already sinking beneath an intolerable burden, were yet more heavily laden. The proprietors of the soil spent their time in riot and debauch while the people were starving. They were the magistrates and at the same time the most notorious violators of the law. “The justices of the peace,” says Arthur Young, “are the very worst class in the kingdom.”
The clergy of the Established Church were little better. Like the landlords, they were generally absentees, and employed agents to raise their tithes, in the North from the Presbyterians, and in other parts of the island from the Catholics. “As the absentee landlord,” says Froude, “had his middleman, the absentee incumbent had his tithe farmer and tithe proctor—perhaps of all the carrion who were preying on the carcase of the Irish peasantry the vilest and most accursed. As the century waned and life grew more extravagant, the tithe proctor, like his neighbors, grew more grasping and avaricious. He exacted from the peasants the full pound of flesh. His trade was dangerous, and therefore he required to be highly paid. He handed to his employer perhaps half what he collected. He fleeced the flock and he fleeced their shepherd.” “The use of the tithe farmer,” said Grattan, “is to get from the parishioners what the clergyman would be ashamed to demand, and to enable the clergyman to absent himself from duty. His livelihood is extortion. He is a wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence.”[[17]]
In the midst of the general excitement the Catholic peasants grew restless under this horrible system of organized plunder and extortion. They banded together and took an oath to pay only a specified sum to the clergyman or his agent. The movement spread, and occasional acts of violence were committed. All Munster was organized, and a regular war with the tithe proctors was begun. In the popular fury crimes were perpetrated and the innocent were often made to suffer with the guilty. Yet so glaring were the wrongs and so frightful the abuses from which the peasants were suffering that they everywhere met with sympathy. The true cause of these disorders was social and not political. Misery, and not partisan zeal, had driven the Catholics to take up arms. The cry of hungry women and children for bread resounded louder in their ears than the shouts of the patriots. They were without food or raiment, and in despair they sought to wreak vengeance upon the inhuman tyrants who had reduced them to starvation. Even Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, was forced to admit that the Munster peasants were in a state of oppression, abject poverty, and misery not to be equalled in the world, and that the landlords and their agents were responsible for the degradation of these unfortunate beings.
Ireland was still a prey to agitations, hopes, and sufferings when the French Revolution of 1789 burst upon Europe. The cry of Liberty, equality, fraternity sounded as revelation to the struggling patriots. Hitherto they had contended for freedom, in the English and feudal sense, as a privilege and a concession; they now demanded it as an imprescriptible right of man. The American Declaration had indeed proclaimed that all men were free and equal, or of right ought to be; but this was merely a pretty phrase, a graceful preamble, in a charter which consecrated slavery and inequality. In America there were no privileged classes, and the people had not groaned beneath the tyranny of heartless and effete aristocracies; the evils of which their leaders complained, compared with those which weighed down the European populations, were slight, almost imaginary. But in France Liberty and Equality was the fierce and savage yell of men who hated the whole social order as it existed around them, and who, indeed, had no reason to love it. The spirit of feudalism was dead, and its lifeless form remained to impest the earth. The nobles, sunk in debauch and sloth, continued their exactions, upheld their privileges, and yet rendered no service to the state. Corruption, extravagance, maladministration, infidelity, and licentiousness pervaded the whole social system. France was prostrate with the foot of a harlot on her neck, and the people were starving. Little wonder, when the torch was applied, that the lurid glare of burning thrones and altars, the crash of falling palaces and cathedrals, should affright and strike dumb the nations of the earth—for God’s judgment was there; little wonder that Ireland, sitting by the melancholy sea, chained and weeping, should lift her head when the God of the patient and the humble was shattering the whitened sepulchres which enshrined the world’s rottenness.
In Belfast the taking of the Bastile was celebrated by processions and banquets amid the wildest enthusiasm, and the name of Mirabeau called forth the most deafening applause. The eyes of Ireland were fastened on France; the cause of the Revolution was believed to be that of all oppressed peoples who seek to break the bonds of slavery. “Right or wrong,” wrote an Irish patriot, “success to the French! They are fighting our battles, and, if they fail, adieu to liberty in Ireland for one century.”[[18]] Even the manners and phraseology of the Revolution became popular in Ireland. The Dublin Volunteers were called the National Guard, the liberty-cap was substituted for the harp, and Irishmen saluted one another with the title of citizen.
Out of this French enthusiasm grew the Society of “United Irishmen,” which soon superseded the Volunteers. The United Irishmen made no concealment of their revolutionary principles. They demanded a radical reform in the administration of Ireland, and threatened, if this was denied, to break the bond which held them united with England. They openly proclaimed their intention of stamping out “the vile and odious aristocracy,” which was an insuperable obstacle to the progress of the Irish people; and to accomplish this they invited the French to invade Ireland. The landlords, they said, show no mercy; they deserve to receive none.