To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.  In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that “Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her:  and in a word, with her to live and to die.”  “At bottom,” he added, “Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice.”  To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion.  Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world.  He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion.  The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made.  To persecute people for believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them for believing too little.  Protestant ascendency was social ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it.  Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments.  He would have been satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded.  Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an opinion.  He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of his birth.  He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a firm supporter of her connection with the State.  But his wife was a Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect.  For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace.  He worshipped the British Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a pension from the king.  The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour.  That Burke should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the Irish historian.  Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists.  Their hero was his critic, Tom