When the rebellion was put down the Government of King George the Third abolished the Irish Parliament, and then all loyal and sensible persons in Westminster assumed, of course, that there was an end of the matter. The rebellion had been put down, the principal rebels had been done to death, Grattan's troublesome and tiresome Parliament had been extinguished, Ireland had been merged into complete identification with England, and surely nothing would be heard of the Irish question any more. Yet the Irish question seemed to come up again and again, and to press for answer just as if answer enough had not been given already. There was a clamor about Catholic Emancipation, and at last the Irish Catholics had to be emancipated from complete political disqualification, and their spokesman O'Connell had been allowed to take his place in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel had carried Catholic Emancipation, for, although a Tory in many of his ways of thinking, he was a statesman and a man of genius; and now Lord Grey, the head of the Whig Government, had no sooner passed the Reform Bill than he found himself confronted with the Irish question in a new shape. We could hardly wonder that Sir Robert Peel or Lord Grey did not try to inform their minds as to Irish national feeling through a study of "Dark Rosaleen," for the good reason that no such poem had yet been given to the world. But neither Peel nor Grey was a type of the average Englishman of the times, and each had gradually borne in upon him, by a study of realities if not of poetic fancies, that the national sentiment of the Irishman was not to be eradicated by any Act of Parliament for his denationalization. Lord Grey, as the friend and pupil of Fox, who had always been the friend of Ireland, must have acquired, as a part of his early political training, the knowledge that Ireland's grievances were not all {207} sentimental, and that if they were to be dealt with by Acts of Parliament these Acts must take the part of relief and not of repression. It may well be questioned whether any population is disturbed for very long by mere sentimental grievances, and it may be doubted also whether the true instinct of statesmanship does not always regard the existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint. Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as that of King William himself.