truly says, as the “defence of the Convention before the bar of history.”  Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for “from that time,” as Mr. Lecky writes, “the conviction sank deep into the minds of many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen.”

The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion itself, is one of the most repulsive in history.  It is repulsive because you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature, visibly wasting under a corrosive acid.  Typical figures stand out:  the strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the case that “to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—­these were my objects.”  Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned “Girondin,” as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring in despair when he saw that anarchy coming.  And on the other side of the water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform, short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only available means, bribery.

In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scapegoats.  Tracing events to their source, we strike against two obstructions, proximity and ignorance, and we may as well make them our scapegoats.  If proximity had implied knowledge and forbearance, all would have been well, but it implied just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of solution which, after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the teeth of ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of Canada and South Africa.