And the manner in which the government was carried on was, if possible, worse even than the principle. The almost continual absence of the Lord-lieutenant inevitably left the chief management of the details in the hands of underlings, and the favor of the Castle was only to be acquired by the lowest time-serving, of which those who could influence elections, wealthy and high-born as they for the most part were, were not more innocent than the representatives. No support to government could be looked for from either peer or commoner unless it were purchased by bribes more or less open, which it was equally discreditable to ask and to grant; for one of the worst fruits of the system which had so long reigned throughout the island was the general demoralization of all classes. Mr. Fronde gives George III. himself the credit of being the first person who resolutely desired to see a change of the system, and to "try the experiment whether Ireland might not be managed by open rectitude and real integrity."[128] But his first efforts were baffled by the carelessness or incompetency of the Viceroys, since it was difficult to find any man of ability who would undertake the office. And for some years things went on with very little change, great lords of different ranks having equally no object but that of controlling the Castle and engrossing the patronage of the government, and in not a few instances of also procuring large grants or pensions for themselves, each seeking to build up an individual influence which no Viceroy could ever have withstood, had they been united instead of being separated by mutual jealousies, which enabled him from time to time to play off one against the other.
But the war with the North American Colonies, which broke out in 1774, by some of its indirect consequences brought about a great change in the affairs of Ireland. The demand for re-enforcements to the armies engaged in America could only be met by denuding the British islands themselves of their necessary garrisons. No part of them was left so undefended as the Irish coast; and, after a time, the captains of some of the American privateers, learning how little resistance they had to fear, ventured into St. George's Channel, penetrated even into the inland waters, and threatened Carrickfergus and Belfast. In matters of domestic policy it was possible to procrastinate, to defer deciding on relaxations of the penal laws or the removal of trade restrictions, but to delay putting the country into a state of defence against an armed enemy for a single moment was not to be thought of; yet the government was powerless. Of the regular army almost every available man was in, or on his way to, America, and the most absolute necessity, therefore, compelled the Irish to consider themselves as left to their own resources for defence. It was as impossible to levy a force of militia as one of regular troops, for the militia could not be embodied without great expense; and the finances of the whole kingdom had been so mismanaged that money was as hard to procure as men. In this emergency several gentlemen proposed to the Lord-lieutenant to raise bodies of volunteers. The government, though reluctant to sanction the movement, could see no alternative, since the presence of an armed force of some kind was indispensable for the safety of the island. The movement grew rapidly; by the summer of 1779 several thousand men were not only under arms, but were being rapidly drilled into a state of efficiency, and had even established such a reputation for strength, that, when in the autumn the same privateers that had been so bold in Belfast Lough the year before reached the Irish coast, in the hope of plundering Limerick or Galway, they found the inhabitants of the district well prepared to receive them, and did not venture to attempt a descent on any part of the island. And, when the Parliament met in October, some of the members, who saw in the success that could not be denied to have attended their exertions an irresistible means of strengthening the rising pretensions of Ireland to an equality of laws and freedom with England, moved votes of thanks in both Houses to the whole body of Volunteers. They were carried by acclamation, and the Volunteers of the metropolis lined the streets between the Parliament House and the Castle when, according to custom, the members of the two Houses marched in procession to present their addresses to the Lord-lieutenant. Such a recognition of the power of this new force stimulated those members who claimed in a special degree the title of Friends of Ireland to greater exertion. A wiser government than that of Lord North would have avoided giving occasion for the existence of a force which the utter absence of any other had made masters of the situation. The Volunteers even boasted that they had been called into existence by English misgovernment. In the words of one of their most eloquent advocates, "England had sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they had sprung up as armed men."
Ireland began to feel that she was strong, and, not unnaturally desired to avail herself of that strength, which England now could not question, to put forward demands for concessions which in common fairness could not well be denied. In 1778, when Lord North, in the hope of recovering the allegiance of the North American Colonies, brought forward what he termed his conciliatory propositions, the Irish members began to press their demand that the advantages thus offered to the Americans should be extended to their own countrymen also; that the fact of the Irish not having rebelled should not be made a plea for treating them worse than those who had; and in the front of all their requests was one for the abolition of those unjust and vexatious duties which shackled their trade and manufactures. But the jealousy of the English and Scotch manufacturers was still as bitter, and, unhappily, still as influential, as it had proved in the time of William III. And, to humor the grasping selfishness of Manchester and Glasgow, Lord North met the demands of the Irish with a refusal of which every word of his speech on the propositions to America was the severest condemnation, and which he sought to mitigate by some new regulations in favor of the linen trade, to which the English and Scotch manufacturers made no objection, since they had no linen factories. The Irish, in despair, had recourse to non-importation agreements, of which the Americans had set the example, binding themselves not to import nor to use any articles of English or Scotch manufacture with which they could possibly dispense. And the result was, that Lord North yielded to fear what he had refused to justice, and the next year brought in bills to grant the Irish the commercial equality which they demanded. Some of the most oppressive and vexatious of the penal laws were also relaxed; and some restrictions which the Navigation Act imposed on commerce with the West Indies were repealed. But, strange to say, the English ministers still clung to one grievance of monstrous injustice, and steadily refused to allow judicial appointments to be placed on the same footing as in England, and to make the seat of a judge on the bench depend on his own good conduct, instead of on the caprice of a king or a minister.
But the manifest reluctance with which the English government had granted this partial relief encouraged the demand for farther concessions. The Irish members, rarely deficient in eloquence or fertility of resource, had been lately re-enforced by a recruit of pre-eminent powers, whom Lord Charlemont had returned for his borough of Moy, Henry Grattan; and, led by him, began to insist that the remaining grievances, to the removal of which the nation had a right, would never be extinguished so long as the supreme power of legislation for the country rested with the English and Scotch Parliament; and that the true remedy was only to be found in the restoration to the Irish Parliament of that independence of which it had been deprived ever since the time of Henry VII. They were encouraged by the visibly increasing weakness of Lord North's administration. Throughout the year 1781 it was evidently tottering to its fall. And on the 22d of February, 1782, Grattan brought forward in the Irish House of Commons a resolution, intended, if carried, to lay the foundation of a bill, "that a claim of any body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to bind this kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." This resolution aimed at the abolition of Poynings' Act. Other resolutions demanded the abolition of the "powers exercised by the Privy Council under color of Poynings' Act," and a farther relaxation of the penal laws. So helpless did the government by this time feel itself, that the Attorney-general, who was its spokesman on this occasion, could not venture to resist the principle of these resolutions, but was contented to elude them for the time by objections taken to some of the details; and Grattan gave notice of another motion to bring the question to a more definite decision, which he fixed for the 16th of April.