world to revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local and sporadic.  General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the horrors he was forbidden to avert.  “Within these twelve months,” he wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation, “every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here....  The struggle has been, in the first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not avow or sanction.”

Abercromby’s resignation, in Mr. Lecky’s opinion, “took away the last faint chance of averting a rebellion.”  Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union.  He had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events, foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual writhings of the men of compromise.  He stands out like a block of black granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and consistency of ideas.  Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a Protestant.  He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a definite theory of government.  Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to say so.  Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland, and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again; that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them.  Racial fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument.  Wrong on one side, revenge on the other; policy, coercion.  As he put it in his famous speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation “were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island.”  “Laws must be framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature,” and laws of this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parliament in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, had shown faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance and the reunion of Irishmen.  He never took the trouble to demonstrate the truth of his theory of revenge by a reasoned analysis of Irish symptoms.  He took it for granted as part of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all philosophers of his school, pointed to the results of misgovernment