There were, indeed, moments in those difficult days when the British people seemed to realise dimly the wisdom of what Burke saw to be the wisest British fighting policy—the policy of rallying Catholic Ireland against revolutionary France. There was, for instance, the mission of Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795—a Whig mission extorted from Pitt against his will, due to a Parliamentary complication, and backed from London with but half-hearted support. That famous mission which sent through Ireland such a strange, sad thrill of hope, soon closed in mist and darkness. Lord Fitzwilliam went to Ireland, as many Englishmen have gone since, with the intention of doing justice. He was thwarted, like most others, by the resistance of the local Ascendancy Party, fighting doggedly for the remnants of its power. It was the place-holders of Ireland who, intriguing with the Ministry in London, led to the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.[66]

For that party was then playing the same part as it is attempting to play to-day. They were playing then, as ever since, on the nerves of Protestant England. They were conjuring up the dread of Catholic power, and the terror of Irish disloyalty. Unhappily, in the confusions of the moment—the confusions of the French wars—they succeeded. By compelling the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam they wrecked the hopes of the Grattan Parliament.

For after 1795 that Parliament was practically doomed, and events moved rapidly to their climax. Grattan, thwarted in his policy, and unwilling to be responsible for a body over which he had no control, withdrew into retirement. The Irish Catholics, feeling themselves again betrayed and deserted, relapsed all over Ireland into sullen indifference and detachment. The Protestant Parliament, deprived of their leader, swung more and more towards the Ascendancy Party. Even so, indeed, the virtue of self-government continued to work. No Parliament has left a better record of good local work for the prosperity of its country than Grattan's Parliament. From end to end of Ireland new industries had sprung up, and new life had been put into old industries. Ireland then was prosperous. Her exports had doubled. Her wealth was increasing. Her towns overflowed with life, and Dublin for the moment almost rivalled London in its brilliancy and its wit.[67]

THE GREAT REBELLION

This prosperity might have saved Grattan's Parliament but for a new movement which had crossed the two channels from France. It is doubtful whether the Catholics alone could have wrecked Grattan's Parliament. It was, curiously enough, the Irish Presbyterians of Ulster—our friends, the Orangemen—who sowed the seeds of revolt against the Protestant Parliament of 1782. It was they, in the combination known as the "United Irishmen," who started the movement that culminated in the Irish Rebellion in 1798. These Presbyterian Nonconformists had all been deeply affected by the doctrines of the French Revolution. They had for years past been agitating for a reform of the Irish Parliament on the lines subsequently adopted in 1831—chiefly by the abolition of the rotten boroughs. Grattan was with them, but again he was powerless. He was opposed, both in Dublin and in London, by the existing executives. Those executives now rested their power almost entirely on the members returned by those very same rotten boroughs. For ever since 1782 bribery had been going on, and as early as 1790 England had been rapidly buying back the hold she had lost in 1782. These being her weapons, it was not likely that the Irish executive was going to yield to the claims of the Irish Presbyterians. The Government resisted, and the movement of the Irish Reformers became more and more formidable.

All these causes of unrest culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798—a horrible event, beginning with the lawlessness of the revolutionary Presbyterians in the north—lawlessness so feebly checked as to raise grave suspicions in regard to the attitude of the Irish Government itself towards a possible revolution. But the outrages of the Orangemen on the Catholics in Ulster, and the Catholic feeling of desertion by the Government, soon produced a far more terrible outbreak in the south. That practically culminated in a religious war between Catholic and Protestant. From that moment the Rebellion was marked by atrocities on both sides almost as terrible as anything which occurred in the French Revolution. The Rebellion was extinguished in blood and fire.

The period of exhaustion and despair that followed in Ireland was seized upon by Castlereagh and Pitt for destroying the Irish Parliament. An immense machinery of bribery and corruption, assisted by pledges that were broken and prophecies that failed, all working under the double shadow of rebellion and war, drove the Irish Parliament to reluctant suicide, and passed into law, both at Dublin and Westminster, the Union Act of 1800.

That great light of the Irish Parliament thus passed suddenly into darkness. The Chamber which had resounded with the eloquence of Flood and Grattan passed over to the money-changers, and ever since the clink of coin has taken the place of the silver voices of the Irish orators.[68]

AFTER THE UNION

The events of 1800 left Ireland, for the moment, prostrate under the heel of Great Britain. The last remnants of self-government disappeared with the absorption of the two exchequers in 1817. Although Ireland still retained a separate administration, that administration was not under the control of any self-governing authority. Out of the Dragon's teeth of the Union rose the sinister army of a new bureaucracy, recruited almost entirely by the enemies of Ireland, and for the most part even working with its guns trained against the hopes and aspirations of the Irish race.