For through the blackness of that night the Irish Parliament always shone like a star. Ireland grew with its growth, and withered with its decay. Precisely as she had more Home Rule she advanced, and precisely as she had less she fell back. But as long as the Parliament existed at all it could never be said that the final spark of liberty had been stamped out. Even in the eighteenth century, when Catholic Ireland seemed to be crushed, and Ireland lay supine beneath the double weight of the penal laws and the commercial restrictions of England--an Ireland pictured for all time by the keen, merciless pen of Dean Swift--still the vestal flame was not quite extinguished. Captured by ascendancy, dominated by fanaticism, narrowed to one faith, or even to one section of that faith, the Irish Parliament still always provided a framework and machinery for a possible moment of regeneration and recovery. That moment came in 1782--came, unhappily both for England and for Ireland, in such a form as to seem to justify the hard saying--"England's danger is Ireland's opportunity." The story of 1782 has been told with surpassing brilliancy in the greatest of all Mr. Lecky's books--the darling of his youth and the worry of his old age--his "Leaders of Irish Public Opinion."[63] The disastrous and wasting struggle against our own kith and kin in the American colonies--forced on England by the folly of the same type of statesmen now resisting Home Rule--had reduced these islands to an almost defenceless condition. The British Army, intended for the defence of Great Britain, had been sent away into the forests and prairies of Northern America to fight an invisible foe, and to meet with a disastrous and undeserved defeat. But in their blind passion to subdue the Americans the British Government had for the moment forgotten Ireland. In their eagerness to conquer their colonies they had forgotten to maintain their hold on the half-conquered country at their side. The British troops had been withdrawn from Ireland as well as from England. At that dramatic moment France came into the struggle with her fleet, and Ireland, with her great harbours and her accessible coastline, could not be left defenceless. As Ireland had no British troops to defend her, it was inevitable that she should be allowed to defend herself. Ireland, never slow in a fight, rose to this crisis. In a few months there sprang up throughout the country that wonderful movement of the Irish Volunteers. Ireland in a few weeks produced an army that kept Europe from her shores. Sixty thousand Irishmen stood to arms. Ireland could no longer be hectored or bullied. She was, for the moment--for the only time in her history--mistress of her own fate.