some fatal defect of understanding.  Grattan became a strong Emancipator, but remained an academic and ineffectual reformer striving in vain to reconcile Reform with a passionate abhorrence of democracy and a determination to keep power in the hands of landed property.  In England, which was Protestant in the Established sense, he would have done no more harm than Burke, who for the same reason fought Reform as strongly as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it.  But in Ireland, which was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy.  Charlemont was an even stranger paradox.  He was an academic Reformer before Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear of Catholic revenge for past wrongs.  These men and their like, admirable and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in those terrible times.  Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter of conjecture.  Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy.  All we can say with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish patronage had much to do with the result.  On the whole, however, I agree with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode, especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.

The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for.  Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone’s middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries.  Reform had been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers, in 1783.  It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at the instigation of Pitt’s own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had urged—­what a grim irony it seems!—­to give “unanswerable proofs that the cases of Ireland and England are different,” and who answered with truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained “by force or corruption.”  Every succeeding year showed the same results.  Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland.  Since the symbol of the Irish Executive was the British