Page:Letters, speeches and tracts on Irish affairs.djvu/13

 collected in this volume cover a period of more than thirty years of Irish history, and show at work all the causes which have brought Ireland to its present state. The tyranny of the grantees of confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendency; the reliance of the English Government upon this ascendency and its instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement as soon as ever the danger was passed,—all these are shown in this volume; the evils, and Burke's constant sense of their gravity, his constant struggle to cure them. The volume begins with the Tracts on the, Popery Laws, written probably between 1760 and 1765, when that penal code, of which the monstrosity is not half known to Englishmen, and may be studied by them with profit in the Tracts, was still in force, and when Irish trade was restricted, almost annulled, from jealousy lest it should interfere with the trade of England. Then comes the American war. In the pressure of difficulty and danger, as that war proceeded. Lord North's Government proposed, in 1778, to conciliate Ireland by partly withdrawing the restrictions on her trade. The commercial middle class,—the class with which a certain school of politicians supposes virtue, abhorring nobles and squires, to have taken refuge,—the men of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and Bristol, were instantly in angry movement, and forced the Minister to abandon his