Page:The Irish Parliament; what it was, and what it did.djvu/20

 power of the Privy Council and increase the power of the House of Lords. More confidence, it was urged, should be placed in the Privy Council, "who were all men firmly attached to the country, than in the House of Lords, many of whom were strangers, and had not a foot of estate in it; and yet could by proxy defeat the best-intended acts of the Commons." Mr. Grattan, too, bitterly complained of the foreign element in the House of Lords, and asked in the House of Commons whether Roman Catholic Irishmen were to be excluded from privileges to which strangers were admitted. " Look to your Peerage," he said, " how many English and Scots are daily made your law-givers. Have you remonstrated against this periodical list, which the breath of a British Minister qualifies to give law and judgment in Ireland without any connection with this country whatever? "

The foreign element in the House of Lords was, with all its grievances, less objectionable than the native accessions to the Irish peerage. It was the system of the Government " by the sale of peerages to raise a purse to purchase the representation, or rather, the misrepresentation, of the people of Ireland." "Will any man say," says Flood, "that the Constitution is perfect, when he knows that the honour of the