The real character of this Parliamentary rule was seen in the rejection of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's eyes the danger of Ireland lay above all in the misery of its people. Although the Irish Catholics were held down by the brute force of their Protestant rulers, he saw that their discontent was growing fast into rebellion, and that one secret at any rate of their discontent lay in Irish poverty, a poverty increased if not originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of Irish products from their natural markets in England itself. One of his first commercial measures therefore, as we have seen, aimed at putting an end to this exclusion by a bill which established freedom of trade between the two islands. But though he met successfully the fears and jealousies of the English farmers and manufacturers he was foiled by the factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, and his bill was rejected by the Irish Parliament. So utterly was he discouraged that for the moment he ceased from all further attempts to improve the condition of Ireland. But the efforts which the French revolutionists made to excite rebellion amongst the Irish roused him to fresh measures of conciliation and good government. The hopes of some reform of the Irish Parliament had been fanned by the eloquence of Grattan and by the pressure of the United Irishmen, an association which had sprung up in Ulster, where Protestant dissenters, who were equally excluded with Catholics from any share in political power, formed the strongest part of the population. These hopes however were growing every day fainter. To the Irish aristocracy parliamentary reform meant the close of a corrupt rule which had gone on unchecked since the American war. But to the Irish Catholic it meant far more; it meant his admission, not only to the electoral franchise, but in the end to all the common privileges of citizenship from which he was excluded, his "emancipation," to use the word which now became common, from the yoke of slavery which had pressed on him ever since the Battle of the Boyne. [Sidenote: The United Irishmen.]