But the most important change lay in the people themselves. The English influence was, of course, paramount, and those who wished to be considered fashionable aped London manners, but slowly and surely there was an awakening of the national spirit; the so-called English colony was beginning to realize the danger of allowing themselves to be subject to the caprices of a Government in London ignorant of Irish affairs. They clamoured for legislative independence, and if their motives were purely selfish and local, yet on the whole they benefited Ireland. Irish trade was being handicapped by English ministers anxious to gain the suffrages of the great trading towns of Bristol and London, and they attempted to impose restrictions on Ireland through the medium of the Dublin Parliament. But the descendants of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian 'undertakers' would have none of it. Their idea was that all Irish affairs should be under the control of the Irish Parliament because they were the Parliament. The eloquence and statesmanship of Grattan and his great contemporaries has gained a not undeserved fame for the Irish Parliament as it existed from 1760 to the Union, but in the fullest meaning of the word it was never a Parliament, even in the sense that the mother of Parliaments {171} in London was falsely supposed to represent England. The majority of the Irish members were party hacks returned in their master's interests to vote without conscience. Religion entered into everything, but in the sixties of the eighteenth century the problem that confronted the English ministry was the position of the 'undertakers.' The latter were now the paramount power in Ireland; they formed the ascendancy, and from their ranks came all the high officers of state and the men who carried out the policy of England. But time taught its lessons, and the Anglo-Irish ignored London--even defied it--and when in 1767 Lord Townshend was sent to Dublin, it was with the undisguised object of crushing the 'undertakers' and regaining for England the chief authority in Ireland. For the first time in the history of Ireland a _resident_ viceroy was appointed. [Sidenote: Breaking the Irish Parliament]