saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed metaphor called the Union.  Here there is no possible see-saw of sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell and Charles I.:  there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for anything else.  Even the incidental resemblances between the two sides only served to sharpen the contrast and the complete superiority of the nationalists.  Thus, Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were both aristocrats.  But Castlereagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court, Fitzgerald the generous gentleman upon the land; some portion of whose blood, along with some portion of his spirit, descended to that great gentleman, who—­in the midst of the emetic immoralism of our modern politics—­gave back that land to the Irish peasantry.  Thus again, all such eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost anywhere) stood apart from the popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they were theoretically Protestants, but practically pagans.  But Tone was the type of pagan who refuses to persecute, like Gallio:  Pitt was the type of pagan who consents to persecute; and his place is with Pilate.  He was an intolerant indifferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but more ready to massacre them.  Thus, once more, the two pagans, Tone and Castlereagh, found a pagan end in suicide.  But the circumstances were such that any man, of any party, felt that Tone had died like Cato and Castlereagh had died like Judas.

The march of Pitt’s policy went on; and the chasm between light and darkness deepened.  Order was restored; and wherever order spread, there spread an anarchy more awful than the sun has ever looked on.  Torture came out of the crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sunlight of the streets and fields.  A village vicar was slain with inconceivable stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted priest.  Rape became a mode of government.  The violation of virgins became a standing order of police.  Stamped still with the same terrible symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of a religion which makes of innocence the Mother of God.  In its bodily aspects it became like a war of devils upon angels; as if England could produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs.  Such was a part of the price paid by the Irish body and the English soul, for the privilege of patching up a Prussian after the sabre-stroke of Jena.