Crown, and the Irish Parliament to have rested the security of the colony upon maintaining a perpetual and impassable barrier against the ancient inhabitants of the country. The executive government was committed nominally to a Viceroy, but essentially to Lords Justices, selected from the principal State Officers of the country, who were entrusted with the conduct of what was called the King's business, but might with more propriety have been called the business of the Lords Justices. The Viceroy came to Ireland for a few months only in two years, and returned to England perfectly satisfied with his mission, if he did not leave the concerns of the English government worse than he found them; and the Lords Justices in his absence were entrusted implicitly with the means of consolidating an aristocratic influence, which made them the necessary instruments of the English government."[1] The administration of the country was also materially facilitated by the large amount of the hereditary revenue of the Crown, making a recourse to Votes of Supply only necessary in alternate years.
How Lord George Sackville did that which neither the legal lore of Molyneux nor in later years the satire of Swift had been able to accomplish, and first shook the machinery by which England compassed the objects of her policy, has been already described, in the words of Shelburne himself.[2] The question at issue in the struggle which lasted from 1749 to 1753 was whether an unappropriated surplus should be regarded as Crown property or was still under the control of Parliament. The former was the contention of the party of the Primate Stone, the latter that of the Speaker Boyle and his supporters. If the surplus was Crown property, it clearly came within the rule that to a Bill affecting the interests of the Crown the previous consent of the Crown is necessary.[3] Heads of a Bill for the appropriation of the surplus were, however, passed by the Commons, and rejected by the Crown. The surplus was then applied by the royal authority. A free distribu-
- ↑ Speech of Lord Clare, 1800.
- ↑ Supra, p. 239.
- ↑ Hallam, iii. 408. Sir Erskine May, Law of Parliament, pp. 423-425, ed. 1893.
