Pitt, after he had been forced into war, at least intended it to be a war on the good old-fashioned principles of seizing the enemy’s colonies and keeping them.  He was taunted by the alarmists with caring only for sugar islands, and making himself master of all the islands in the world except Great Britain and Ireland.  To Burke all this was an abomination, and Windham followed Burke to the letter.  He even declared the holy rage of the Third Letter on a Regicide Peace, published after Burke’s death, to contain the purest wisdom and the most unanswerable policy.  It was through Windham’s eloquence and perseverance that the monstrous idea of a crusade, and all Burke’s other violent and excited precepts, gained an effective place and hearing in the cabinet, in the royal closet, and in the House of Commons, long after Burke himself had left the scene.

We have already seen how important an element Irish affairs became in the war with America.  The same spirit which had been stirred by the American war was inevitably kindled in Ireland by the French Revolution.  The association of United Irishmen now came into existence, with aims avowedly revolutionary.  They joined the party which was striving for the relief of the Catholics from certain disabilities, and for their admission to the franchise.  Burke had watched all movements in his native country, from the Whiteboy insurrection of 1761 downwards, with steady vigilance, and he watched the new movement of 1792 with the keenest eyes.  It made him profoundly uneasy.  He could not endure the thought of ever so momentary and indirect an association with a revolutionary party, either in Ireland or any other quarter of the globe, yet he was eager for a policy which should reconcile the Irish.  He was so for two reasons.  One of them was his political sense of the inexpediency of proscribing men by whole nations, and excluding from the franchise on the ground of religion a people as numerous as the subjects of the King of Denmark or the King of Sardinia, equal to the population of the United Netherlands, and larger than were to be found in all the states of Switzerland.  His second reason was his sense of the urgency of facing trouble abroad with a nation united and contented at home; of abolishing in the heart of the country that “bank of discontent, every hour accumulating, upon which every description of seditious men may draw at pleasure.”

In the beginning of 1792 Burke’s son went to Dublin as the agent and adviser of the Catholic Committee, who at first listened to him with the respect due to one in whom they expected to meet the qualities of his father.  They soon found out that he was utterly without either tact or judgment; that he was arrogant, impertinent, vain, and empty.  Wolfe Tone declared him to be by far the most impudent and opinionative fellow that he had ever known in his life.  Nothing could exceed the absurdity of his conduct, and on one occasion he had a very narrow escape of