swamped, and the country ruled by a very different class and according
to very different ideas from those which prevailed in the Parliament
of which Grattan was a member. And would a Roman Catholic Parliament
and nation care to remain subject to a King of England whose title
depended on his being a Protestant? Grattan, however, swept all such
considerations aside with an easy carelessness. He believed that under
the influences of perfect toleration large numbers of Roman Catholics
would conform; and the remainder, quite satisfied with their position,
would never dream of attacking the Church or any other existing
institution. We may smile at his strange delusions as to the future;
but he was probably not more incorrect than many people are to-day in
their conjectures as to what the world will be like a hundred years
hence; and if we try to place ourselves in Grattan's position,
there is something to be said for his conjectures. At that time the
influence of the Church of Rome was at its lowest; Spain had almost
ceased to exist as a European power; and in France the state of
religious thought was very different from what it had been in the days
of Louis XIV. Irish Roman Catholic gentlemen who sent their sons to
be educated in France found that they came back Voltaireans; even the
young men who went to study for the priesthood in French seminaries
became embued with liberalism to an extent that would make a modern
Ultramontane shudder. Then in Ireland all local power was in the hands
of the landlords; the Roman Catholic bishops possessed hardly any
political influence. It would have required more keenness than a mere
enthusiast like Grattan possessed to foresee that the time would come
when all this would be absolutely reversed. What was there in the
eighteenth century to lead him to surmise that in the twentieth the
landlords would be ruined and gone, and that local government would
have become vested in District Councils in which Protestants would
have no power, but over which the authority of the bishops would be