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.
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