There was one people, British yet not Anglo-Saxon, very, much nearer the home centre, who made a bold claim, and in part a successful claim, at this moment for their independence--the Irish. By a law of George I., known as Poyning's Act, from its proposer, no measure passed by the Parliament of Ireland could become law until it had received the assent of the King of England. It was this law of which the Irish, under the lead of Grattan, their great orator, obtained the repeal in the year 1782, taking advantage of the dire straits in which England then found herself. It needs but a moment's thought to show that this repeal meant all the difference between a dependent and an independent Parliament in Ireland. It put Irishmen into the position that they were free to legislate in all Irish matters without interference from England. Irishmen in large numbers had before this emigrated to America, and naturally had been active in inflaming the anti-English feeling in the colonies. Besides all political reasons, and the real grievances under which the Irish had suffered from the English, the fact that the great majority of them were Catholics was an added occasion why these people of a Celtic origin could not be at rest under the government of the Anglo-Saxon Protestants. {150} [Sidenote: Church of Rome in Ireland] The political power of the Church of Rome, that is to say, the power of the Pope to interfere in the government, had received some severe checks even in the countries where Roman Catholicism was the religion of the State. As early as 1753 the Pope had yielded to the King of Spain the power to make appointments to the high dignities in the Church; but still the Romish Church meddled with politics abroad. Such interference was resented by the despotic kings of the Bourbon branch of the great Capet stock, both in France and Spain. The political activities of the very able and energetic order of Jesuits gave special offence to the Governments. Portugal had commenced the campaign against them by driving them out as early as 1759. In France their activities were suppressed five years later. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain, and within a very few years such pressure was put upon the Pope that he was obliged to break up their order in Italy itself. We have seen how Spain was ground beneath the heel of the Inquisition--not acting under orders from Rome but on its own initiative. Now, that is to say, in 1774, the Spanish Government asserted itself to confine the judicial power of the Inquisition to ecclesiastical cases; that is to say, that its officials might only arrest and try and punish the people guilty, or suspected of guilt, against the laws of the Church. Before that, it had been in the habit of arresting and trying and punishing persons suspected of breaking the common law of the land, the civil law. The Inquisition's claim to try these civil cases had been without legal