Crown, he, of course, abjured the Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the American or Canadian patriots.  He simply loved his country, and from the first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her.  Tolerance to him was not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy.  He took little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to the poll by their Protestant landlords.  Nor was he even an extreme Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling franchise.  His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most sober political common sense.

His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a Government which did not emanate from or represent them, and which was ruinous to them.  It is not surprising that he failed.  Ireland was very near England.  French intervention had been decisive in distant America, and the French Revolution in its turn had been hastened by the American example.  But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command of the sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of little material value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish Revolutionists.  It is the manner of Tone’s failure and the consequences of his failure that have such a tragic interest.  A united Ireland could have dispensed with the aid of France.  What prevented unity?  Tone laboured to bring both creeds together, and to a certain degree was successful.  Until the very last it was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank most from revolution.  Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the North never moved, while Catholic Wexford and Wicklow rose.

The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose long neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest justification for Reform.  The Orange Society, founded under that name in 1795, originated in the “Peep o’ Day Boys,” a local association formed in Armagh in 1784 for the purpose of bullying Catholics.  There is no doubt that the underlying incentive was economic.  Even when the Penal Code had lost in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of the persecuted Catholics.  As I pointed out in a former chapter, the reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating leases and fixing new rents by auction, with the alternative of eviction, threw those Protestant tenants who did not emigrate into direct competition with Catholic peasants of a lower economic stamp, who because they lived on little could afford to offer fancy rents.  Hence much bitter friction, leading to sordid village rows and eventually to the organized ruffianism of the Peep o’ Day Boys.  The Catholic Franchise Act of 1793, unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified the trouble by removing the landlord’s