"'Is twice blessed-
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.'"
It might, he said, be regarded as "a treaty with Ireland by which that country would be put on a fair, equal, and impartial footing with Great Britain, in point of commerce, with respect to foreign countries and our colonies." The community of burdens which his measure would impose on Ireland was this: that whenever the gross hereditary revenue of Ireland should exceed L650,000 (an amount considerably in excess of anything it had ever yet reached), the excess should be applied to the support of the fleet of the United Kingdom. It was, in fact, a burden that could have no existence at all until the Irish trade had become far more flourishing and productive than as yet it had ever been. Yet a measure conceived in such a spirit of liberality, and framed with such careful attention to the minutest interests of Irish trade, Mr. Brownlow did not hesitate to denounce as one "tending to make Ireland a tributary nation to Great Britain. The same terms," he declared, "had been held out to America, and Ireland had equal spirit with America to reject them." He even declared that "it was happy for Mr. Orde" (the Chief Secretary, who had introduced the measure into the Irish House of Commons) "that he was in a country remarkable for humanity. Had he proposed such a measure in a Polish Diet, he would not have lived to carry back an answer to his master. If," he concluded, "the gifts of Britain are to be accompanied with the slavery of Ireland, I will never be a slave to pay tribute; I will hurl back her gifts with scorn." Baffled by such frantic and senseless opposition, Pitt condescended to remodel his measure. In its new form it was not so greatly for the advantage of Ireland. He had been constrained to admit some limitation of his original liberality by the opposition which, it had met with in England also where Fox, at all times an avowed enemy of freedom of trade, had made himself the mouth-piece of the London and Liverpool merchants, who could not see, without the most narrow-minded apprehension, the monopoly of the trade with India and the West Indies, which they had hitherto enjoyed, threatened by the admission of Ireland to its benefits. And now a clause in the second bill, binding the Irish Parliament to reenact the Navigation Laws existing in England, called up an opposition from Grattan[132] as furious as that with which Mr. Brownlow had denounced the original measure. To demand the enactment of the English Navigation Law, he declared, was "a revocation of the constitution;" and his rival, Flood, in his zeal to emulate his popularity with the mob, surpassing him in vehemence, inveighed against the clause, as one intended to make the Irish Parliament a mere register of the English Parliament, "which it should never become". All the arguments brought forward in favor of the measure by the supporters of the government-arguments which, probably, no one would now be found to deny to have been unanswerable-failed to make the slightest impression on a House in which the chief object of each opponent of the ministry seemed to be to outrun his fellows in violence; and eventually the measure fell to the ground, and for fifteen years more Ireland was deprived of the advantages which had been intended for her.
And even yet the danger from the Volunteers was not wholly extinguished. Though their Convention had been suppressed, its leaders had only changed their tactics. Under the guidance of a Dublin ironmonger, named Napper Tandy, they now proposed to convene a Congress, to consist, not, as before, of delegates from the Volunteer body, but of persons who should be representatives of the entire nation; and Tandy had even the audacity to issue circulars to the sheriffs of the different counties, to require them, in their official capacity, to summon the people to return representatives to this Congress. The Sheriff of Dublin, a man of the name of O'Reilly, obeyed the requisition; but Fitzgibbon, who, luckily, was now Attorney-general, instantly prosecuted him for abuse of his office. He was convicted, fined, and imprisoned, and his punishment deterred others from following his example. And a rigorous example had become indispensable, since it was known to the government that Tandy and some of his followers were acting in connection with French emissaries, and that their object was the separation of Ireland from England, and, in the minds of some of them, certainly the annexation of the country to France; indeed, on one occasion Fitzgibbon asserted in the House of Commons that he had seen resolutions inviting the French into the country. The government would gladly have established a militia to supersede the Volunteers, but the temper of the Irish Parliament, in its newly-acquired independence, rendered any such attempt hopeless; and Mr. Grattan, with a perversity of judgment which his warmest admirers must find it difficult to reconcile with statesmanship, if not with patriotism, even opposed with extreme bitterness a bill for the establishment of a police for Dublin, though he could not deny that there existed in the city an organized body of ruffians, who made not only the streets but even the dwelling-houses of the more orderly citizens unsafe, by outrages of the worst kind, committed on the largest scale-assaults, plunderings, ravishments, and murders. In the rural districts of the South the disturbances were so criminally violent, and so incessant, that the Lord-lieutenant was compelled to request the presence of some additional regiments from England, as the sole means of preserving any kind of respect for the law; and more than once the mobs of rioters showed themselves so bold and formidable, that the soldiers were compelled to fire in self-defence, and order was not restored but at the cost of many lives.
Presently a Conspiracy Bill was passed, and gradually the firmness of the government re-established a certain amount of internal tranquillity. But shortly afterward a crisis arose which, more than the debates on the commercial propositions, or on the Volunteers, or on the police, showed how over-liberal had been the confidence of the English minister who had repealed Poynings' Act, and had bestowed independent authority on the Irish Parliament before the members had learned how to use it. We have seen how keen a contest was excited in the English Parliament by the deranged condition of the King's health in 1788, and the necessity which consequently arose for the appointment of a Regency. Grattan was in London at the time, where he had contracted a personal intimacy with Fox, and had been presented by him to the Prince of Wales, whose graciousness of manner, and profession of adherence to the Whig system of politics, secured his attachment to that party. Grattan was easily indoctrinated by Fox with his theory of the indefeasible claim of the Prince to the Regency as his birthright, and is understood to have promised that the Irish Parliament should adopt that view. The case was one which seemed unprovided for. There was no question but that the law enacted that the sovereign of England should also be the sovereign of Ireland. But no express law of either country contained any such stipulation respecting a Regent; and Grattan conceived that, in the absence of any pre-existing ordinance, it would be easy to contend that the Irish Parliament was the sole judge who the Regent should be, and on what terms he should exercise the royal authority.
The Irish Parliament had been prorogued in 1787 to the 5th of February, 1789, the same day on which, after numerous examinations of the physicians in attendance on the royal patient, and after the passing of a series of resolutions enunciating the principles on which the government was proceeding, Pitt introduced the Regency Bill into the English House of Commons, being prepared to conduct it through both Houses with all the despatch that might be consistent with a due observance of all the forms of deliberation. Grattan's object was to anticipate the decision of the English Parliament, so as to avoid every appearance that the Irish Parliament was only following it; and he therefore proposed that the House of Commons should instantly vote an address to the Prince, requesting him to take upon himself the Regency of the kingdom of Ireland, by his own natural right as the heir of the crown; making sure not only that his advice would be taken by those whom he was addressing, but that the House of Lords would not venture to dissent from it.