[63] See the essays on Flood and Grattan. (Longmans, 2 vols., 1903.) [64] Grattan, 16th April, 1782. HOME RULE IN HISTORY GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT "To destroy is easy: the edifices of the mind, like the fabrics of marble, require an age to build, but ask only minutes to precipitate: and as the fall of both is an effort of no time, so neither is it a business of any strength. A pick-axe and a common labourer will do the one--a little lawyer, a little pimp, a wicked Minister the other." GRATTAN (1800.) "Yet I do not give up my country. I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a glow of beauty-- 'Thou art not conquered: Beauty's ensign yet Is crimson on thy lips and in thy cheeks, And Death's pale flag is not advanced there.'" GRATTAN (In the final debate on the Act of Union, May 26th, 1800). CHAPTER VIII. HOME RULE IN HISTORY Grattan's Parliament was the first Parliament with full legislative authority possessed by Ireland since the time of Henry VII. It existed for nearly twenty years, and in that brief time it did a great work for Ireland. If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough, in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament with his venomous hate, and finally compassed its doom--the famous Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:-- "=There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as Ireland.="[65] But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by experience. One was that although the Irish Parliament obtained the right of legislation, the appointment of the Government and the Executive was still placed in the hands of the Irish Privy Council, and therefore of the British Central Government. That meant, in the end, that the British Government still possessed the leverage for recovering the powers of legislative initiative and legislative veto. As far as Ireland possessed separate executive powers, she used them with loyalty and patriotism. Take, for instance, her finance. Ireland possessed, under the settlement, a separate Irish Exchequer, and the British Government could levy no war taxes in Ireland, except with the consent of the Irish Parliament. That gave to the Irish Parliament an immense power of checking and hampering England in her struggle against Napoleon. If we were to judge from some of the talk heard at the present moment, one would take for granted that Ireland must have refused all help to England in that struggle.