“Talk not to me of peace,” exclaimed Hussey Burgh, one of the leading patriots. “Ireland is not at peace; it is smothered war. England has sown her laws as dragon’s teeth, and they have sprung up as armed men.” All Ireland was aroused. The Irish, said Burke in the English House of Commons, had learned that justice was to be had from England only when demanded at the point of the sword. They were now in arms; their cause was just; and they would have redress or end the connection between the two countries. The obnoxious laws restricting trade were repealed and in the greatest haste sent over to Ireland to calm the tempest that was brewing there. The effect went even beyond expectation. Dublin was illuminated, congratulatory addresses were sent over to England, and people imagined that Ireland’s millennium had arrived. But the consequences of centuries of crime and oppression do not disappear as by the enchanter’s wand; and one of the evils of tyranny is the curse it leaves after it has ceased to exist. In the wildness of their joy the people exaggerated the boon which they had wrenched from England; the sober second thought turned their attention to what still remained to be done. In 1780 Grattan brought forward the famous resolution which declared that “the king, with the consent of the Parliament of Ireland, was alone competent to enact laws to bind Ireland.” The time could not have been more opportune. The American colonies were in full revolt; Spain and France were assisting them; England had been forced into war with Holland, and her Indian Empire was threatening to take advantage of her distress to rebel. In the midst of so many wars and dangers it would have been madness to have provoked Ireland to armed resistance, and Grattan felt that the hour had come when the Irish people should stand forth as one of the nations of the earth; when all differences of race and creed might be merged into a common patriotism, and Celt and Saxon, Catholic and Protestant, present an unbroken front to the English tyrant. “The Penal Code,” he said, “is the shell in which the Protestant power has been hatched. It has become a bird. It must burst the shell or perish in it. Indulgence to Catholics cannot injure the Protestant religion.”