association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless
without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more
remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period,
doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is true that the
great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a
quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned
by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose
mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just
taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed
rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at
large. Without "Emancipation," that is, the permission to elect
Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was
illusory and even harmful. In the counties the forty-shilling "freehold"
vote ("freehold" was an ironical misnomer) encouraged Protestant
landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still
further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the
benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied
Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown
away. Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete
farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance,
were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110
Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools. As usual, the men of
light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system
which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned. Each of them had
some fatal defect of understanding. Grattan became a strong Emancipator,
but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to
reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a
determination to keep power in the hands of landed property. In England,
which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no
more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly