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men. The story of how they threatened to turn their cannon not upon American warships but upon the Dublin Castle government, is too well known to need repetition here. But when Free Trade was won, and the Sixth of George I repealed, the fervour of the aristocratic leadership of the Volunteers was no longer evident. They, having achieved their object, strove now with all their energy to destroy the instrument by which they had gained it. It was not so easy, however, to stifle a newly-awakened democracy, and Volunteer Conventions demanding popular Protestant representation in the nominally-freed Parliament, gave great uneasiness to Lord Charlemont, leader of the Volunteers, and his friends. Some of the Volunteers even favoured Catholic emancipation, though the movement, with very few exceptions, was entirely Protestant in personnel.
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM IMPERATIVE.
Was Parliamentary reform a matter of such importance? Let us glance at the legislature for the freedom of which so much gunpowder had been wasted.
"The state of Parliamentary representation is as follows: 17 boroughs have no resident electors; 16 have but one; 90 have but 13 electors each; 90 persons return for 106 rural boroughs—that is 212 members out of 300, the whole number; 54 members are returned by 5 noblemen and 4 bishops, and borough influence has given the landlords such power in the counties as make them boroughs also."
It must be remembered that the great mass of the people, the Catholics, comprising three-fourths of the nation, had no civil rights, and did not possess five-sixteenths of the land of their country. The Presbyterians of the North, who numbered nearly a million, were also denied complete civil rights and compelled to pay tithes to the Established Church which they detested at least as much as did their Catholic neighbours.
In Parliament Grattan spoke of the Volunteers of the nineties as "an armed rabble," while Charlemont moaned "Alas, they are no longer what they were." Stringent Arms Acts were passed, and the Volunteers of Belfast and Dublin were proclaimed illegal.
But the Volunteers had achieved their purpose, and more than their original purpose. In their ranks Presbyterian and
