Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/329

After Limerick the Irish Parliament—how it represented an extremely small minority of the Irish people, how it was cut off from the mass of the people by the great gulf of religion, and how over one half of its members were nominated by individual borough owners—it is a real matter of surprise that anything like a feeling of nationality should have arisen, and that the Irish Parliament should even faintly have reflected public opinion. That this should have been the case was directly due to English financial and administrative policy, which was resented bitterly by the whole body of the Protestant gentry. The members of this class who still lived in Ireland were not all directly touched by the restrictions placed on Irish trade and industry, but they were all touched by the fact that they could not get profitable employments for themselves or their sons, while they objected strongly to seeing the taxes they paid going into the pockets of disreputable persons of both sexes. It was this misguided policy on the part of England which did so much to foster the new national spirit among the Protestant gentry, a spirit voiced for the first time by Molyneux, taken up in his satirical and narrow way by Swift, and emphasised by Lucas, until in the last quarter of the eighteenth century patriotic Protestants were 317