His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a Government which did not emanate from or represent them, and which was ruinous to them. It is not surprising that he failed. Ireland was very near England. French intervention had been decisive in distant America, and the French Revolution in its turn had been hastened by the American example. But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command of the sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of little material value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish Revolutionists. It is the manner of Tone's failure and the consequences of his failure that have such a tragic interest. A united Ireland could have dispensed with the aid of France. What prevented unity? Tone laboured to bring both creeds together, and to a certain degree was successful. Until the very last it was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank most from revolution. Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the North never moved, while Catholic Wexford and Wicklow rose.
The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose long neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest justification for Reform. The Orange Society, founded under that name in 1795, originated in the "Peep o' Day Boys," a local association formed in Armagh in 1784 for the purpose of bullying Catholics. There is no doubt that the underlying incentive was economic. Even when the Penal Code had lost in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of the persecuted Catholics. As I pointed out in a former chapter, the reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating leases and fixing new rents by auction, with the alternative of eviction, threw those Protestant tenants who did not emigrate into direct competition with Catholic peasants of a lower economic stamp, who because they lived on little could afford to offer fancy rents. Hence much bitter friction, leading to sordid village rows and eventually to the organized ruffianism of the Peep o' Day Boys. The Catholic Franchise Act of 1793, unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified the trouble by removing the landlord's motive to prefer a Protestant tenant on account of his vote. Under ill-treatment, the Catholics naturally retaliated with a society known as the "Defenders," and in some districts were themselves the aggressors. Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect, spread to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and became merged in Whiteboyism. This had always been an agrarian movement, directed against abuses which the law refused to touch, and without religious animus, although the overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in the regions where it flourished would have placed the Protestants at their mercy. In Ulster both the contending organizations necessarily acquired a religious form and necessarily retained it. But at bottom bad laws, not bigotry, were the cause. There was nothing incurable, or even unique, about the disorders. Analogous phenomena have appeared elsewhere, for example, in Australia, between the original squatters on large ranches and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for closer settlement. Under a rational system of tenure and distribution there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even larger population. Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, seems never to have appreciated what was going on. So far from healing the schism, he appears to have widened it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into the scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen. But, in truth, he was helpless. Good administration only could unite these distracted elements, and without the Reform for which he battled, good administration was impossible. The dissension, widening and acquiring an increasingly religious and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which originally was the seat of the Revolution. The forces normally at work to favour law and order—loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the French Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish conspiracies—gathered proportionately greater strength.
The Southern Rebellion of 1798—a mad, pitiful thing at the best, the work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted minds the splendid ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to penetrate—was a totally different sort of rebellion from any he had contemplated. It was neither national nor Republican. The French invasions had met with little support; the first with positive reprobation. Nor was it in origin sectarian, although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of the prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined in it because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages of oppression. In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the world to revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local and sporadic. General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the horrors he was forbidden to avert. "Within these twelve months," he wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation, "every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here.... The struggle has been, in the first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not avow or sanction."
Abercromby's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, "took away the last faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events, foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and consistency of ideas. Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a Protestant. He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a definite theory of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland, and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again; that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side, revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation "were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island." "Laws must be framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parliament in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, had shown faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance and the reunion of Irishmen. He never took the trouble to demonstrate the truth of his theory of revenge by a reasoned analysis of Irish symptoms. He took it for granted as part of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all philosophers of his school, pointed to the results of misgovernment and coercion as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their need for more coercion. Anticipating a certain limited class of Irishmen of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he used to bewail English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance of the incurable criminality of his own kith and kin. He was just as immovably cynical about the vast majority of his own co-religionists as about the conquered race. If, as was obvious, so far from fearing the revenge of the Catholics, their unimpeded instinct was to take sides with them to secure good government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who could not see the doom awaiting them. Yet Fitzgibbon's admirers must admit that his consistency was not complete. He was perfectly cognizant of the real causes of Irish discontent. He was aware of the grievances of Ulster, and his description of the conditions of the Munster peasantry in the Whiteboy debates of 1787 is classical. If pressed, he would have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and the condition of its maintenance. That other strange lapse in 1798, when he described the unparalleled prosperity of Ireland since 1782 under a Constitution which, in the Union debates of 1800, he afterwards covered with deserved ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points.
These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive coherence of his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of the Empire. The theory, of course, extends much farther than the bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South Africa, and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Anyone who reads the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty of "framing laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature." In a word, the theory is in essence not so much anti-racial as anti-democratic, while finding its easiest application where those distinctions of race and creed exist which it is its effect, though not its purpose, to intensify and envenom. Fitzgibbon is a repulsive figure. Yet it would be unjust to single him out for criticism. Like him, the philosophers Hume and Paley believed in oligarchy, and accepted force or corruption as its two alternative props. Burke thought the same, though the Pitts thought otherwise. Fitzgibbon's brutal pessimism was only the political philosophy of Paley, Hume, and Burke pushed relentlessly in an exceptional case to its extreme logical conclusion. But we can justly criticize statesmen of the present day who, after a century's experience of the refutation of the doctrine in every part of the world, still adhere to it.
CHAPTER IV
THE UNION
The worst feature of Fitzgibbonism is that it has the power artificially to produce in the human beings subject to it some of the very phenomena which originally existed only in the perverted imagination of its professors. Some only of the phenomena; not all; for human nature triumphs even over Fitzgibbonism. There has never been a moment since the Union when a representative Irish Parliament, if statesmen had been wise and generous enough, to set such a body up, would have acted on the principle of revenge or persecution. Nor, in spite of all evidences to the contrary, has there ever been a moment when Protestant Ulstermen, heirs of the noble Volunteer spirit, once represented in such a Parliament, would have acted on the assumption that they had to meet a policy of revenge. Nevertheless, Fitzgibbonism did succeed, as it was to succeed in Canada, in making pessimism at least plausible and in achieving an immense amount of direct ascertainable mischief.
The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal three generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened under the operations of economic forces connected with race and religion, yet perfectly capable of adjustment by a wise and instructed Government, yawned wide from 1798 onwards, when Government had become a soulless policeman, and scenes of frenzy and slaughter had occurred which could not be forgotten. Swept asunder by a power outside their control, Protestants and Catholics stood henceforth in opposite political camps, and it became a fixed article of British policy to govern Ireland by playing upon this antagonism. The flame of the Volunteer spirit never perished, but it dwindled to a spark under the irresistible weight of a manufactured reaction. Dissenters and Anglicans united, not to lead the way in securing better conditions for their Catholic fellow-countrymen, not for the interests of Ireland as a whole, but under the ignoble colours of religious fanaticism. Hence that strangely artificial alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the democratic tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; an alliance formed to meet an imaginary danger, and kept in being with the most mischievous results to the social and economic development of Ireland. Since the Protestant minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine of Ascendancy, which had showed certain manifest signs of decrepitude under Grattan's Parliament, was reconstructed on a firmer, less corrupt, and more lasting basis.