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.
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