can but trace a little farther back; and wherever the understanding can first clearly reach the precise social workings of any place and time, that will seem to be the beginning. While, throughout, those moral and political workings which we have endeavoured to define, have been gaining the point of efficient power, and throwing out occasional, local, and partial indications, seldom to be rightly comprehended till seen afar from the vantage-ground of time. An attentive observation, directed either to popular history, or to the conflict of political opinions and the expositions of public writers and speakers, or still more to the general impressions of the public mind, as manifested in private circles, cannot fail very clearly to perceive how confused a notion of the real progress of the current of human affairs is obtained by those who seem to be most actively engaged or keenly interested in the movements of their own day. We have more than once adverted to this remarkable truth, and feel here tempted to quote a passage from one of the letters of Sir Walter Scott, in which it is very strikingly expressed. Having alluded to Walpole's memoirs of the last ten years of George II., he proceeds, "It is acrid and lively, but serves, I think, to show how little those who live in public business, and, of course, in constant agitation and intrigue, know about the real and deep progress of opinions and events. The memoirs of Sir George Mackenzie are of the same class; both immersed in little political detail, and the struggling skirmish of party, seem to have lost sight of the great progressive movements of human affairs. They put me somewhat in mind of a miller, who is so busy with the clatter of his own wheels, grindstones, and machinery, and so much employed in regulating his own artificial mill-dam, that he is incapable of noticing the gradual swell of the river from which he derives his little stream, until it comes down in such force as to carry his whole manufactory away before it.”*

The advance of intelligence and wealth had long been gathering power and growth in England, as through all the States of civilized Europe, when the great rebellion in the time of Charles I. shook loose the constitutional ligaments and joinings of the then existing frame of the commonwealth, and a revolution began which met with various stops and impulses, but which could not stand still until a level had been attained fully commensurate with the stature of the public mind. It ran through its natural stages as the opposite forces prevailed, until, with much crime and madness on one side, and no great wisdom or virtue on the other, the revolution was brought to a most happy termination by the change which placed William III. upon the throne. From this great era England and Ireland - and every State in Europe went on in the ordinary course of national progress, though with very unequal steps; improving in condition, and gathering new strength in trade and knowledge for a few generations, little interrupted by any wide or permanent obstacle. During the interval thus described, Ireland is mainly remarkable for that inequality which has been often observed in the course of this book, and which we shall more fully explain presently. The popular pressure which she opposed

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, Vol. vi.

against the barriers of jurisdiction was but slight, compared with the force and energy of democratic resistance and popular self-assertion in England. She had, as yet, no people, and was chiefly subject to the collisions of her divided aristocracy,* and the various action of other causes; the enforced partiality of government to English interests, and the official maladministrations which were the necessary result of such a state of things. And this statement may be taken as a summary description of the condition of the country, from the revolution of 1688 till the commencement of the American war.

At this point we arrive at another and very advanced stage in the history of European, and, still more, of British progress. The beginning of the disputes which led to the American war was another of those shocks, of which the effect was expansive, inevitable, and proportioned to the real progress which had been gained in the previous interval. The struggle in which the States of the American Union shook off the colonial yoke, was but an event which must sooner or later have occurred but we are here only concerned with some remoter consequences. The shock of the struggle and of its event reached England, Ireland, and France; and variously affected them, according to their then existing conditions. These several impulses, ere long, became in a manner combined, or were perhaps severally modified and augmented by a mutual reaction. Both of these considerations will be of use to us. We must first observe the event with regard to Ireland.

The jealousy of commercial interests, in which the disadvantages had, of course, been felt by the weaker, operated to create a disunion between the two kingdoms. To maintain this superiority was an obligation enforced on the British government by the English people. In Ireland, a growing discontent on this score, augmented by other local discontents, was to be dealt with by the policy of government; and for this end the Irish parliament was to be managed by all those means which have been found effectual for such purposes. To extort concessions to the superiority and admissions of the interference of the English commons; to repress the outcries of commercial grievance; and to bring the income of the revenue to its highest level, were the primary duties of the vice-regal administration. And, for this, the Irish parliament was to be gained by the most profligate system of corruption and disunion. By taxation beyond the wealth of the country, a most exorbitant pension list was maintained-sinecures and offices did their ordinary work-and even national dissensions of old standing were pressed into the service, and the hands of government were strengthened by the cultivation of those rooted animosities, which have mainly depressed and retarded the true interests of the country. But there was beneath the surface a growing intelligence, and a spirit of resistance gathering. It only required the necessary occasion and the impulse to put it into motion. They came together across the waves of the Atlantic. The progress of the American war, while it communicated popular impressions, of which the effects were not very remote, placed England in a position of the most formidable emergency.

The word is here used in its most general sense.

A league of continental hostility appeared to menace an overwhelming addition to the exhausting struggle into which she had been betrayed, and there came an interval in which the safety of the Ocean Queen seemed compromised, when

"The boldest held his breath

For a time."

But the exigency thus created was in Ireland productive of momentous consequences; in the alarm of immediate invasion the northern city of Belfast applied for protection to government-the answer of the Irish secretary was an acknowledgment of helplessness; and the effect was one of which the remotest consequences might have been clearly seen to the simplest political understanding. This effect was the arming of the Irish volunteers. This movement, which hereafter will be fully detailed, originated in no party design-it was as purely patriotic as it is reasonable to demand in any confederation of armed men. Its immediate object was soon attained; the menaced invader, whose main dependence was the ancient character of the Irish for readiness to join any enemy of England, shrunk back from the noble display of courage and patriotism which the emergency of England had thus called forth. It, however, so happened, from causes to be explained further on, that the increasing political intelligence and spirit of Ireland became at this anxious moment concentrated into a combination of patriotism, genius, and public virtue. The position of independent strength thus gained, could not fail to be quickly felt by all parties. The effect was universal, as the real character of the circumstances was imposing. It was no secret combination, such as this nation had been so often depressed and diseased by, of the basest elements:-the hopes of plunder, the phrenzy of tumultuary commotion, or the low ambition of demagogues. It was the concentration of the best elements-the substantial yeomen and the thriving burghers of the commercial north, armed by the government, and officered by the entire nobility and gentry of the country. The learned professions furnished their liberal quota of scholars and gentlemen—the university of Dublin, as well as the law courts, gave eclat and credit to ranks, which may well and truly be honoured with the much abused name of patriot.

This is not the place to enter minutely upon the details of this great incident in our history, or of its progress and consequences. Large bodies of the best citizens of the most civilized nation which history records are little likely to have much political wisdom; a national emergency is easily comprehended; long grievances and sore oppression require little exposition; but an army, even of patriots, is a bad council of state. The sense of power-the conviction of having done good-the consciousness of patriotic aims-imparted to forty thousand armed men an impression of political importance. They soon reached the limit which separates influence from armed dictation; their influence, it is to be admitted, was, even from the first, mainly due to their attitude of force; but this, for a time, was a tacit impression, and supported with the utmost seeming of undisciplined forbearance; they presently assumed a tone of conscious importance; they raised

their demands, and spoke as men who could not be well denied. They also outlasted the constitutional period of their existence, and became an object of apprehension to their best friends, and of justifiable suspicion to the government.

But they are here only noticed as the sign and development of a growing spirit of resistance to a pressure inconsistent with the actual condition of the country, and with that sense of independence mainly caught from England, and already transfused among the educated and commercial classes; though the contagion of their example, of the language they used, and of the bold attitude they assumed, vastly accelerated the gathering spirit of the time. A large section of the house of commons was composed of their officers-their leaders were distinguished for their respectability and influence among the lords. They were thus sanctioned, and, at the same time, with difficulty, and imperfectly restrained. The temperate firmness of Charlemont, the dexterity of administration, the liberal and fair concessions then made to Ireland, and their own oversights, gradually brought them to a fortunate end; but the effect remained. The opposition in parliament, as well as the constituency by which it was maintained, had greatly grown in numbers, concert, and power. Other influences gradually were poured into the mass of intractable elements which must accompany such a state of things-the spirit of resistance cannot be confined to the good and wise. Disaffected feelings and revolutionary tenets began to breathe throughout Ireland, as in England, and throughout Europe. Many incidents and events, here necessarily omitted, occurred, to alarm the apprehensions of the British cabinet. One, comparatively trifling, has been supposed to have had a critical and determining effect. This was the regency question, in 1789, on which occasion the Irish parliament took a high and irrespective course, which is thought afterwards to have mainly operated on the Pitt administration in the introduction of the union. The political incidents which followed this event, may be regarded as appurtenant to the history of the United Kingdom. A general statement of its most prominent social and moral consequences, must presently obtain a place in these preliminary reflections.

Constitutional changes in England.-Looking back to the elementary conditions stated in the commencement of this introduction, and looking on revolutions as great social convulsions which either abate certain barriers to human progress, or restore, from age to age, the balance between the growth and the due control, the enlarging and the coercive powers of a state, the proposition will be very clearly understood, that the permanency of any system of government, in a highly improving country, must depend on the concurrent provision for change, which is to be found in its legal and constitutional polity. It is evident that, were it possible for a just system of government to throw out new provisions, and to throw off old ones so as to secure a precise adaptation concurrent with the entire alteration effected by time upon a nation, there would be far less occasion for the great revolutions which are the main events of history.

The constitution of England was no sudden growth of human invention, constructed by that shallow ingenuity which conjures up from

the floating confusion of present events, systems which the unanticipated future is to sweep away in the torrent of change. It was the slow growth from the accumulated sagacity of ages which, in England, alone, perhaps, was enabled to assert its free action upon the course of political progress. The "wisdom of our ancestors" is an old phrase which the visionary speculation of the last generation has sneered out of our language: the sober, grave, and imposing fanaticism of theory, looks with a sense of delusive superiority upon the slow and cautious judgment which is content to follow the course of time, to. build upon the foundations of the past, and to lay down its lines within the compass of its real experience. In this we can see the same spirit and the same results as may be traced in all the departments of human knowledge-speculation after speculation blowing up its sparkling and evanescent bubbles along the mighty stream-while systems of unconjectured reality are growing together, the result of innumerable incidents, and workings, and intellects, all apparently tending and striving different ways. The British constitution can be traced in the History of England from remote reigns, in the well-combined, well-balanced, and, fortunately timed strivings and collisions of political elements in a moral and intellectual medium which would seem to have been tempered by Providence for the purpose of bringing forth and nurturing the growth of liberty. The same steady, resolute, and cool nature that characterized the disciplined heroism of the field of Waterloo, is even singularly conspicuous along the whole line of events, from the field of Runnemede to the crowning era of the Bill of Rights. Not by the ascendancy of that popular dictation which has latterly been asserted in random speeches, but by that transfusion of a popular sentiment of justice and liberty which is the essential spirit of the British character, however modified by local and accidental influences, or by the universal tendencies of human nature. The people of England has not been merely represented in the house of commons, it has always existed within the walls of parliament; and the spirit by which it is cemented and animated transfuses a cordial warmth even

upon the throne. But we overshoot our purpose. The peculiar principle which we had here designed simply to exemplify is, indeed, best to be understood by contemplating the popular character of all our institutions.

Among the causes which have neutralized the disorganizing influence of revolution in England, is mainly to be reckoned the elasticity of its constitution. When nicely analyzed, every main portion of it will appear to contain, in itself, some provision for the uniform and regular advances of the general condition of the people. The nearly unprecedented rapidity of these advances has, indeed, been such as to render unusually evident some of the principles of this adaptation. We cannot enter upon them here; they cannot be discussed without some digression from our main purpose; they may, however, be briefly exemplified in the dormant efficacy of a considerable portion of the executive power of the state,-much of which will, on examination, be observed to be contingently provisional; and, hence, to be dependent for its activity on the necessity for which it is provided. The mere consideration that nearly the entire of our legal processes