ABSTRACT
The statesman who occupies in the struggle the place Shaftesbury holds in the other is John Bright, whose speeches on Ireland are among the noblest of his career. Bright famous warning to the Irish landlords, that property has duties as well as rights, was the sharpest comment that could be made on the spirit in which most English Governments treated Irish problems. Charles James Fox and his friends wanted the English Government to encourage the Irish Parliament to admit the Catholics and to befriend the movement in Ireland for breaking down the great divisions that separated the mass of the people from a small privileged minority. An acute observer has remarked that it was the great misfortune of Ireland in the eighteenth century that she had two masters: England and the English garrison in Ireland.
