motive to prefer a Protestant tenant on account of his vote.  Under ill-treatment, the Catholics naturally retaliated with a society known as the “Defenders,” and in some districts were themselves the aggressors.  Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect, spread to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and became merged in Whiteboyism.  This had always been an agrarian movement, directed against abuses which the law refused to touch, and without religious animus, although the overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in the regions where it flourished would have placed the Protestants at their mercy.  In Ulster both the contending organizations necessarily acquired a religious form and necessarily retained it.  But at bottom bad laws, not bigotry, were the cause.  There was nothing incurable, or even unique, about the disorders.  Analogous phenomena have appeared elsewhere, for example, in Australia, between the original squatters on large ranches and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for closer settlement.  Under a rational system of tenure and distribution there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even larger population.  Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, seems never to have appreciated what was going on.  So far from healing the schism, he appears to have widened it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into the scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen.  But, in truth, he was helpless.  Good administration only could unite these distracted elements, and without the Reform for which he battled, good administration was impossible.  The dissension, widening and acquiring an increasingly religious and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which originally was the seat of the Revolution.  The forces normally at work to favour law and order—­loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the French Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish conspiracies—­gathered proportionately greater strength.

The Southern Rebellion of 1798—­a mad, pitiful thing at the best, the work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted minds the splendid ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to penetrate—­was a totally different sort of rebellion from any he had contemplated.  It was neither national nor Republican.  The French invasions had met with little support; the first with positive reprobation.  Nor was it in origin sectarian, although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn.  Several of the prominent leaders were Protestants.  Priests naturally joined in it because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages of oppression.  In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent.  But it was not even spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which emerges.  The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the