738 Chapter XXX
for the Irish House of Commons—though not to be elected to it. They could now
become members of municipal corporations and take degrees from Dublin Uni-
versity. It was hoped thus to prevent the union of Catholics and Dissenters against
the establishment, but the number of Catholics benefited by the concessions of
1793 was not great, and the agitation continued. A small group of Whigs in the
Parliament introduced a reform bill, hoping to deflect the forces of radicalism. It
was a moderate bill, but it soon collapsed before the immovable self- satisfaction of
the Irish Commons, expressed, as in 1783, by that strong man of the established
order, and friend of Burke, Sir Hercules Langrishe, who now reinforced his former
arguments by pointing to the horrors of the Revolution in France, which proved,
he said, that a mere breath of change would lead to convulsions.
The United Irish Society of Dublin, early in 1794, produced and publicized a
draft for a reform bill of its own. To undercut the vested interests lodged in bor-
oughs and counties, and to push aside differences arising from religion, it adopted
the new principle of personal, individual, and numerical representation. It pro-
posed that 300 electoral districts, equal in population, should each send one repre-
sentative to the House of Commons. All domiciled men over twenty- one were to
vote. The House should be newly elected once a year. Members were to receive pay,
and be under no requirement to own property. Except in rejecting the secret ballot,
the program anticipated the Chartism of the 1830’s, and it shared in the theory of
representation which the American and French revolutions had developed, and
which the “sister republics” to France were soon also to adopt. Such theory, how-
ever, was contrary to the theory of the British and Irish constitutions; and would
also, if acted upon, become an actual menace to the existing social order. The
United Irishmen of Dublin, far from being merely or naively political, saw their
program as a step toward other changes—toward the abolition of tithes and pri-
mogeniture, and a transformation of taxes and tariffs, upon which the socio-
economic- ecclesiastical institutions of the country so largely rested.^54
Meanwhile many of the Irish radical leaders, both Catholic and Protestant,
came to believe that the welfare of most of the Irish people required a severance of
the British connection, without which the ascendancy in Ireland could not survive.
Their case was not unlike that of the Dutch patriots who also had made serious
efforts for constitutional change in the 1780’s, run up against an uncompromising
refusal on the part of Dutch conservatives, and had reason to believe that the Or-
ange regime, as restored in 1787, was wholly dependent on the support of En-
gland. Like the embittered Dutch patriots, the frustrated Irish felt neither loyalty
to their own government nor sympathy for its war with France. Irish and Dutch
both entered into secret correspondence with the French in 1794. The Committee
of Public Safety sent over an agent to inquire into the strength of a revolutionary
movement in Ireland. This agent was William Jackson. It may be noted, as a sug-
gestion of the role of America in these events, that it was this Jackson who had
edited, back in 1783, the London edition of the American state constitutions and
state papers of the American Revolution. Jackson was caught in Dublin by the
54 McDowell, Public Opinion, 197–99, and “Select Documents: United Irish Plans for Parliamen-
tary Reform,” in Irish Historical Studies, III (1942), 39–59.