Canning and Huskisson were always close friends and often ministerial colleagues, and they two may be said to have led the way towards the system of free trade to which the time had not yet come for Robert Peel to give his complete adhesion. The great question of electoral reform was coming up, and Charles Grey and Henry Brougham were among its most conspicuous leaders. Canning did not take to Parliamentary reform, although he was what might be described as an advanced Liberal on most other questions of national importance. The Duke of Wellington was strongly opposed to any proposals for a change in the Parliamentary system, and this was one of the few great questions on which Canning and he were in habitual agreement. Then there was the still more pressing question of political equality for the Catholics of the three kingdoms. Lord John Russell succeeded later on in carrying the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which precluded Protestant Dissenters from holding political or municipal office, but the attempt to obtain the rights of equal citizenship for subjects of the King who belonged {53} to the Church of Rome had to encounter much greater difficulties. As might easily be expected, Ireland became the main battle-field of this struggle. We have already recorded the fact that Pitt had been greatly assisted in passing the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland and abolishing Grattan's Parliament by the hopes which he held out that the union of the legislatures would be followed by a complete measure of Catholic emancipation. George the Third refused point-blank to give his assent to any such measure, or even to listen to any proposal for its introduction, declaring again and again that his coronation oath absolutely forbade him to entertain an idea of the kind. In the end, as we have seen, Pitt gave in and undertook never again to worry the mind of his conscientious sovereign by any talk about relief to George the Third's Roman Catholic subjects. But it soon became evident that in this as in other instances the resolve of the most headstrong monarch, and the promise of the most yielding Prime Minister, cannot always induce a population to put up passively with a manifest grievance. In Ireland, where six out of every seven of the people belonged to the Church of Rome, and where the demand for Catholic Emancipation had long been championed by the greatest and the most patriotic of Protestant Irishmen, it was utterly impossible that any King and any minister could impose submission on such a question. By the time at which we have now arrived the Catholics of Ireland had found a political leader of their own faith.