1798. STATE OF PARTIES IN IRELAND. 127 rebel leaders of any ability. Tone had taken no active part in the insurrection, having been absent from Ireland during the last four years, engaged in what may be termed the diplomatic service of the rebellion, in France and Holland. He was tried by martial law, illegally, as it seemed, his offence being treason, and condemned to death. He desired to be executed as a soldier, on the ground that he bore a commission as an officer in the French service; but this claim being disallowed, he anticipated the ignominious fate of a felon by committing suicide in prison. the rebellion. In the disaster of the French expedition, the last hopes of the rebellion were extinguished. Suppression of The grievances of the Irish people were manifold; and it must be admitted that the prospect of redressing those grievances by lawful means had nearly disappeared when the insurrection began. The release from civil incapacity of the Roman Catholic people, which had been in progress since 1782, was to have been completed by the great measure of emancipation which was brought forward by Ireland's most honoured statesman, with the approval of the Irish Government, in 1794. When this policy was suddenly and rudely reversed by the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, the Catholics of Ireland felt that they must either submit to the denial of their political claims or resort to those means of relief which the people in all ages have attempted under intolerable oppression and wrong. But the Catholics, if they rose, would have to encounter not only the British Government, but the fierce and resolute minority of their own countrymen, who were ready and willing to maintain Protestant ascendency by the extermination, if possible, of the hated Romanists. They might, indeed, join the revolutionary party, and possibly throw off the dominion of Great Britain; but this would be to exchange the dominion 128 CONFLICT BETWEEN CH. XXXVIII. of heretic but monarchical England for infidel and republican France. And even if Ireland were to establish her independence, the Catholic Church would still languish under the shade of a Protestant democracy. The intelligent Catholics, for the most part, held these opinions. A few days before the rebellion broke out, a paper was put forth with the signatures of the most eminent and respectable members of the Catholic body, exhorting their people to abstain from violence, and to relinquish treasonable engagements, which would only bring ruin on themselves, and disgrace on their religion. Among the leaders of the insurrection, which included several gentlemen of family and fortune, no Catholic of note was to be found. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O'Connor, Bagenal Harvey, Colclough, and Oliver Bond were Protestants. Even the adventurers, Wolfe Tone and the brothers Sheares, who desired to revolutionise Ireland after the French model, if they belonged to any religious persuasion, were Protestants. Reynolds, the son of a bankrupt trader† in Dublin, was considered an important accession to the rebel Directory, because he was a Roman Catholic; but Reynolds, when he found that the views of the United Irishmen were not limited to reform, and the removal of religious distinctions, recoiled with horror from their plans of treason and revolution, and could find no rest until he had put the Government in possession of the conspiracy against them. In the shallow counsels of the United Irishmen, the rebellion was to accomplish a great political revolution, and Ireland was to be an independent republic; but There are, in this country, two sets of men who are interested in promoting a change: the Catholics of the south, the known friends of monarchy; the Presbyterians of the north, the votaries of republicanism.' - Ponsonby's Speech on Parliamentary Reform. Reynolds was what was called a squireen; and, like most persons of that class, was in embarrassed circumstances.'-Life of Thomas Reynolds. 1798. CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS. 129 no sooner was the sword unsheathed, than the political character of the insurrection vanished into air; and the conflict degenerated into a provincial struggle between the rival religions and races, whose animosities had distracted the island since the time of Strongbow. The Catholic peasantry, led by priests, went out to meet Protestant yeomanry, who fought under the Orange banner, the latest of many emblems of the subjection of the Celtic race. The savage joy with which the peasantry of Leinster revelled in the unwonted luxury of English blood at Prosperous and at Wexford was inflamed by the traditions of Tredah and Wexford when Cromwell destroyed their forefathers like vermin a century and a half ago. A hundred years had nearly elapsed since the Irishry had swarmed from the cabins of Connaught and Munster to defend the cause of absolute monarchy against the revolutionary doctrines of limited and responsible power; and again they had been crushed by the master race. But whether they fought in the name of absolute monarchy, or in the cause of simple democracy, it was still the rage of Papistry against Protestantism, of the Celt against the Saxon, which animated their tumultuous ranks. Oliver, and William, and George were all alike to the Whiteboys, and the Defenders, and the Croppies, who knew no other cause than the cause of Popery and Irishry, against the heretic and the foreigner. But they ever fought in a hopeless cause. Ireland, to be Catholic, must be independent of England; and she cannot be independent of England while England herself is free. Even if the geographical position of the island left it possible that her independence, or her dependency on any other country but Great Britain, could be compatible with the British Empire, the Irish people themselves are perhaps the least qualified of any people in Europe for free institutions. They have not yet acquired the elements of political education, 130 CONDITION OF IRELAND. CH. XXXVIII. and appear to be as far as ever from learning the first maxim of good government, the separation of political affairs from spiritual control. While the English barons in Parliament assembled were waging war with prerogative, and winning the liberties of their country; while the English Commons were successfully asserting the great principles of representative government, the state of Ireland was much the same as that in which Britain was found by Severus, or the lieutenants of Claudius. The Celtic principalities of the Sister Isle had never been visited by those hardy missionaries from the officina gentium who founded the Heptarchy, and substituted for a savage license the rudiments at least of political freedom. Barbarous England had undergone this wholesome invasion; and the Teutonic settlers had been, in their turn, invaded by a superior tribe, which united with the vigour and enterprise of the north a tincture of politeness and of the arts of civilised life, to which the Saxon race were strangers. The Norman conquest of Ireland was on too small a scale to effect the subjugation of the country; and the noble race which attempted to colonise Ireland pined in provincial inactivity, or degenerated to the level of the slothful barbarians, with whom they mingled their blood. Then came the English of the pale, who occupied the Irish soil, as the English now occupy New Zealand. Yet the natives fared better under the Norman nobles, who treated them as barbarians, than under the Republican dispensation. Cromwell and his lieutenants, not satisfied with prosecuting a war of extermination against the unhappy people, drove the remnant whom the sword had spared to the savage rocks and mountains of Connaught; and forbade them to intrude on the more fertile and habitable portions of the island. More than five millions of acres of the best land were parcelled out among the puritanical adherents, 1798. CLOSE OF THE REBELLION. 131 and the soldiers of the Commonwealth. Despised as an inferior race, and disqualified by their religion for the privileges of citizens, the Irish for six hundred years had been ruled by a government over which they had no more control than the Hindoos or the Cingalese. Their virtues and failings were in an opposite direction to those which are found in people who flourish under free municipal institutions. Their failings were such as are bred by oppression and the denial of political rights; dissimulation and falsehood, recklessness, indolence, want of self-reliance. Their virtues were religious reverence, courage, fidelity. But their religion was a blind superstition; their courage, for want of proper training and a just direction, became wanton and mischievous; their fidelity, like that of another branch of the Celtic family, consisted in a passionate attachment to the old territorial aristocracy. These are not the qualities which make good citizens or a great people; though they have made Irishmen, when removed from the depressing influences of their native soil, brilliant adventurers, eminently successful in civil affairs, and unrivalled in the field of war. Union proposed. No sooner had the rebellion been suppressed, than the Government proposed, to the Parliament of each country, the union of Great Britain and Ireland under a common legislature. This was no new idea. It had frequently been in the minds of successive generations of statesmen on both sides of the Channel; but had not yet been seriously discussed with a view to immediate action. Nothing could have been more safely predicted than that Ireland must, sooner or later, follow the precedent of Scotland, and yield her pretensions to a separate legislation. The measures of 1782, which appeared to establish the legislative independence of Ireland, really proved the vanity of such a pretension, and hastened the inevitable day when the Parliament at Dublin must |