SECTION II.

HAD the gains and losses in the game of intrigue been confined to the players, their strokes and counter-strokes might have been observed with contemptuous interest. Behind Ministers and delegates lay unhappily the Irish people, who were being driven mad by visionary hopes, and through a thousand channels were taught to look for the day when Ireland would be once more their own, and the tyranny of centuries would be over. They were told that they were emancipated. To them emancipation meant that they were to pay no more rents and tithes. They heard of religious equality. If religious equality was to be worth having, it implied equality of property, land at ten shillings an acre or no shillings, and the sacred soil of Ireland no longer trampled by the hoof of the invader.1

The determination of Pitt to force on the Catholic question had passed like a stream of oxygen over the half-smothered and smouldering ashes. Savage at the submission of the Catholic Committee to Major Hobart's terms, the agitators told the peasantry that they were betrayed. The Defenders became every hour more numerous and more audacious. The United Irishmen of Dublin published a furious attack on the Secret Committee of the Lords which

1 Miscellaneous reports from the South and West of Ireland, April and May, 1793.-S. P. O.

was almost an invitation to violence.

The Government had little fear of open rebellion. They had great and well-grounded fears for the lives of the Protestant families who were scattered over the country by secret assassination.

To chain up the incendiary spirit before the fire spread farther they summoned Simon Butler and Oliver Bond to the Bar of the Upper House, sent them for six months to Newgate for breach of privilege, and fined each of them 500l. The increase of the army made possible at last more vigorous measures against the Defenders. Throughout the midland counties the peasants were now armed, either out of the Volunteer stores surreptitiously dispersed among them, or by the plunder of the houses of Protestants. They were not afraid to meet the troops in the field: “in Louth fifty of them were killed in a single fight in February; above a hundred were lodged in gaol; yet the Government felt that they were not yet at the bottom of the plot.'

2

Undeterred by the suppression of "the National Guard" in Dublin, the Northern Republicans paraded in green uniforms at Belfast. General Whyte was sent down in March to enforce submission. The Liberal journals published blazing stories of dragoons dashing through the streets with drawn sabres, insulting Patriot tradesmen and behaving like infuriated savages, till the heroic Volunteers drew out and drove them from the town.3 General Whyte tells what really occurred. He had sent four troops of the 17th Dragoons to disarm the "Guard." On the evening of the 9th of March a corporal and a

1 The Chairman and Secretary of the Dublin lodge.

2 "Ed. Cooke to Nepean, Feb. 26, 1793."

8 See Tone's Memoirs, March, 1793.

private, off duty, strolled out of the barracks into the city, where they met a crowd of people round a fiddler, who was playing Ca ira. They told the fiddler to play "God Save the King." The mob damned the King, with all his dirty slaves, and threw a shower of stones at them. The two dragoons, joined by a dozen of their comrades, drew their sabres and "drove the town before them." Patriot Belfast had decorated its shops with sign-boards representing Republican notables. The soldiers demolished Dumourier, demolished Mirabeau, demolished "the venerable Franklin."1 The Patriots, so brave in debate, so eloquent in banquet, ran before a dozen Englishmen. A hundred and fifty Volunteers came out, but retreated into the Exchange and barricaded themselves. The officers of the 17th came up before any one had been seriously hurt, and recalled the men to their quarters. In the morning General Whyte came in from Carrickfergus, went to the Volunteer committee room, and said that unless the gentlemen in the Exchange came out and instantly dispersed, he would order the regiment under arms. They obeyed without a word. "Never," said Whyte, "was any guard relieved with more satisfaction to themselves." 2 The dragoons received a reprimand, but not too severe, as the General felt that they had done more good than harm. On the 11th the Sovereign of Belfast was informed that the meeting of unauthorized armed associations was now forbidden by law; the Volunteers must cease to exist, and if they again as

1 McCabe, the owner of one of these shops, hung up his own portrait afterwards in the place of the destroyed friend of liberty, with the words "McCabe, an Irish slave."

2 Report of General Whyte, inclosed in a letter of March 19 from Westmoreland to Dundas.

sembled they would be apprehended and punished. The order was obeyed. "The citizen defenders of Ireland's liberties," said the "Northern Star," the organ of the United Irishmen, "considered it more magnanimous" to bow for the present to tyranny. "The time would come, and come shortly, when Ireland might see the saviours of the country once more in formidable array."

66

To this had sunk the famous Volunteers of Ireland

the wonder of the world. The time for their reappearance did not come, and here was their final end. Their glory was to have won an independence which when brought to the test of fact was found a thing of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Independence which was to be more than a name had first to be fought for; and the Volunteers being formed of materials too worthless even for rebellion, were at last extinguished with ignominy.

The peasantry, unhappily for themselves, were made of sterner stuff. They boasted less. They passed no resolutions about the inalienable rights of man; but they had in them the ancient inbred hatred of the Saxon conquerors. Coercion had awed them into submission, but with the first signs of weakness in the ruling powers the hereditary animosity revived. The landlords had sown the wind and were to reap the whirlwind. The Irish nation, as it is passionate and revengeful, so beyond most others it is malleable by just authority. The Celtic "earthtiller" will repay his liege lord for kindness and generosity with romantic fidelity. Two centuries had been allowed to the Saxon intruders to win the affection of the native race. The Irish peasants remained in rags like their ancestors; lodged under one roof

with their pigs and cows, paying rent to masters who had no care for their bodies; paying tithes to clergy who cared as little for their souls; maintaining gallantly, in the midst of their wretchedness, their own hedge-schools and their own priests; crooning their own songs and airs, and nursing their melancholy history; every rock and glen peopled with traditions of some battle with the Saxons, some daring exploit of hunted rapparees. So it had gone on till they were told that their chain was broken. They looked into the justice which was said to have been done at last, and they found that it meant no more than the privilege of helping to send one of their Protestant masters to Parliament. They heard that if they wanted more they must arm, as the Volunteers had armed. They must make the Government afraid of them, and the Government would then give them their way.

So long as the Catholic Committee was sitting in Dublin the outbreaks of violence had been local, and under the influence of the priests the advanced Catholic patriots had abstained from organized conspiracy. In that body there was no longer hope. A general meeting of the Committee was called on the 16th of April, to review the conduct of Keogh and the delegates. They had accepted Hobart's terms, and had promised that the Committee should be dissolved. Half the members of it believed that the cause had been betrayed. The Secretary ought to have been told to take back his Bill. The delegates ought to have insisted on the fulfilment of Dundas's promises. The country would then have been roused, and complete Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform would have been carried together.