government standing very much aloof, and leaving the country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant Churchmen. He saw the Anglo-Irish bitterly discontented with the mother country, and the Catholic native Irish regarded by their Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense contempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which his American counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the Red Indian. To the AngloIrish the native peasant was as loathsome as the first, and as terrible as the second. Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that the various descriptions of the people were kept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talked to a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to a gardener's workman or some other labourer of the second or third order, while a little time before this they were so averse to have them near their persons that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stables.1 Chesterfield, a thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor people in Ireland were used "worse than negroes" by their masters and the

1 Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, Works, ii. 557, b.

middlemen.1 We should never forget that in the transactions with the English Government during the eighteenth century, the people concerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists of 1691, "the aristocracy," as Adam Smith said of them, "not founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices—distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed."

"2

The directions in which Irish improvement would move, were clear from the middle of the century to men with much less foresight than Burke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, either by Independence or Union, on the one hand, and the gradual emancipation of the Catholics, on the other, were the two processes to which every consideration of good government manifestly pointed. The first proved a much shorter and simpler process than the second. To the first the only obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the English merchants. The second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the tyrannical

1 Earl Stanhope's History, v. 123.

2 Last chapter of the Wealth of Nations, p. 430.

Protestant faction in Ireland, the disgraceful but deeprooted antipathies of the English nation, the weakness of one minister and the Egyptian darkness of his successors, and above all the prejudice of two of the worst and most obstinate of English sovereigns. Burke did not survive to see the fulfilment of either pieces of an Irish policy, of which he was in its general aims one of the earliest and most earnest advocates. The history of the relations between the mother country and her dependency during his life may be characterised as a struggle upon commercial and legislative points, between the Imperial Government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which each side for its own convenience drew support from the Catholic majority. The efforts to complete the incorporation of Ireland with England by the Government, to procure her independence of England by the Anglo-Irish, lent-not, assuredly, by the design of the workers on either sidepowerful succour to the second movement, that which aimed at the restoration of the Catholics to civil rights.

It was easy to see that the resistance of the American colonists would encourage the Anglo-Irish colonists, suffering, as they were, from an identical grievance, to struggle for a similar relief. "To read what was approaching in Ireland in the black and bloody charac

ters of the American war," in Burke's words, became the duty of every enlightened observer of public affairs. Even the King predicted that if America became free, "Ireland would soon follow the same plan, and be a

separate state." In fact, along with the American war we had to encounter an Irish war also; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called it at the time, a smothered war. r. Like the Americans, the Anglo-Irish entered into non-importation compacts, and they interdicted commerce. The Irish volunteers, forty thousand strong, were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the English ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry first for commercial, and then for legislative, independence. They were too strong to be resisted, and in 1782 the Irish Parliament acquired the privilege of initiating and conducting its own business, without the sanction or control either of the Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Following a shadow, they missed the substantial reality. Dazzled by the chance of acquiring legislative independence, they had been content with comparatively small commercial concessions obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke in 1778, and with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed

1 Corr. with Lord North, ii. 254.

minister in the following year. After the concession of their independence in 1782, they found that to procure the abolition of the remaining restrictions on their commerce the right of trade, for instance, with America and Africa-the consent of the English legislature was as necessary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from Adam Smith, brought forward in 1785 his famous commercial propositions, of which the theory was that Irish trade should be free, that Ireland should be admitted to a permanent participation in commercial advantages, while in return for this boon she should, after her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance of the navy, in which both nations had an interest. Nothing could be more equitable, nothing more certain to prove beneficial to the mercantile interest of the sister island. Pitt was to be believed when he declared that of all the objects of his political life, this was in his opinion the most important that he had ever engaged in; that he did not expect ever to meet another that should rouse every emotion in so strong a degree as this did.1

The factious course pursued by the English Opposition was only less detestable than the folly of the AngloIrish leaders. Fox, who was ostentatiously ignorant

1 Earl Stanhope's Life of Pitt, i. 261–275.