we have yet had experience, if it is not the most effective of the instruments of anarchy. It embarrasses the executive Government when it most requires discretionary liberty of action, and brings discredit upon it by unscrupulous abuse when its difficulties require most candid consideration. It encourages the hopes of fanatics and enthusiasts, provides madness with argument, and tells the incendiary and revolutionist that his objects are good, and are resisted only by selfishness and wickedness.

In no country and at no time could an Opposition in Parliament have worked more mischievously than in Ireland at the existing crisis. Grattan had sown the seeds of disorder by feeding the nation with hopes of an independence to which no political short-cut was possible. If Ireland was to be independent, the road towards it lay through order and industry, and practical energy and union. The liberties which she desired were forever impossible so long as the passions were alive which he had stimulated by his fervid declamation. He had persuaded his Irish clients that a millennium was only waiting for them till they had thrown off the authority and influence of England. They had gained step after step, yet the millennium was no nearer. As the direct power of England declined, English influence had become more all-pervading than ever. Their obvious conclu

sion was that they had not liberty enough; they must strike at the point where that influence was seated. They must have Parliamentary Reform; they must have Catholic Emancipation; they must place the power of the country where England would be unable to reach it; and independence would then be a reality. Mr. Grattan insisted, and perhaps he believed, that

Ireland in complete possession of self-government would become a loyal member of the empire; but he had led the country to expect that with self-government her material misfortunes would give place to plenty and prosperity; and when this hope was disappointed, when, instead of prosperity and internal union, they found only internal quarrels and consequent increase of misery, was it not inevitable, had it not been the unvarying experience in the history of every revolutionary movement recorded, that when the millennium proved still an ignis fatuüs that when the hoped-for prosperity still hovered unobtained beyond the people's grasp, they would have carried Grattan's arguments to their natural conclusion, and have insisted on complete separation? The rule of England, Mr. Grattan told them, had been the source of all their woes. The rule was gone, but an English Viceroy was still at the Castle; there was still the baneful connection under the Imperial Crown. The reins would have been snatched by bolder hands, or Grattan himself would have been swept away in the torrent. The demand would have risen that Ireland should be as free as America; and England must have either yielded to her own destruction or drawn the sword at last at a worse disadvantage than in 1690, when the control of the army and the police, and the internal functions of the executive authority of the State, had been allowed to pass out of her hands.

The United Irishmen had avowed from the beginning that Emancipation and Reform were but means with them towards a further end. The leading Catholics professed to be loyal; but every one who knew the genius of the Catholic Church knew also that

when the power was in its hands it would be content with nothing short of complete ascendancy, and the ascendancy of a Catholic majority meant a return to the measures of King James's Parliament. The feeble and half-affected moderation of a few bishops and noblemen would have been but a bulwark of straw against the will of three million Celts clamoring for a restoration of the lands, and under these conditions the continuance of a shadowy connection between the islands could have been purchased only by acquiescence in a confiscation to which England could never consent without dishonor and degradation.

These consequences of the political measures which Grattan demanded were so obvious on the surface, and were so undisguisedly confessed as their real objects by the conspirators out of doors, that the Parliamentary Opposition, the Duke of Leinster and Lord Moira, the two Ponsonbies and Grattan, must be credited with weaker intellects than they possessed could they have been really blind to them. They probably considered that the war with France would fail, that democracy was to be in the ascendant over Europe, that Ireland was to achieve separation, and that it would be better arived at constitutionally than through open rebellion. Grattan may have calculated that his services to the patriot cause would secure him the first place in the new Commonwealth which was to be added to the Sovereign States of Europe. Moira and Leinster may have hoped to secure their estates amidst the general wreck of the Protestant proprietary. Their more hot-headed and younger

confederates were less able to wait for the slow process of a Parliamentary campaign, or perhaps the

rule of proceeding continued as before. The Constitutional leaders were to persevere in pressing their demands through the legitimate channels, while agitators out of doors were to enforce their arguments by terrorism.

Arthur O'Connor had been one of the few persons who on the appearance of the French had passively if not actively opposed the enrolment of the Yeomanry. His loyalty had been reflected upon in a publication which he attributed to the Castle; and as he had himself by his own subsequent confession personally invited the invasion, and was at that moment a member of the Executive Committee of United Irishmen, it must be admitted that he was not accused without reason. He could not afford at the moment to show his true colors. He had steady friends and supporters in the English Whigs, with whom it was necessary to keep on terms. The English Cabinet was known to be wavering in its Irish policy. He used the opportunity, therefore, to publish an open and insolent defiance of the Government at the Castle. He delivered himself, through a newspaper at Belfast, of an address to his fellow-citizens. "In the conscious integrity of his heart" he repudiated the charge of disaffection. He represented himself as a martyr to the cause of the Catholics. He had been disinherited, he said, for his devotion to their interests by his uncle, Lord Longueville. Interpreting the future by his hopes, he described Great Britain as an ancient tyrant, now reeling to her ruin ; and in a cataract of that fatal eloquence which hides truth from Irishmen, as colored fireworks hide the stars, he thus addressed Lord Camden and Fitzgibbon and the other members of the Irish Executive :

"Abandoned Administration, who have trampled on the liberties of my country, do you presume to accuse me of dissuading my countrymen from arming to oppose an invasion which your and your accomplices' crimes have provoked? Is it that the inalienable rights of free-born men to make their laws by delegates of their choice should be bartered and sold by usurpers and traitors that I should persuade them to arm? Is it that our markets, our manufactures, our commerce, should be sold to that nation which appoints our Government and distributes our patronage, that I should persuade them to arm? Is it to support the Gunpowder Bill, which deprives them of arms, or the Convention Bill, that I should persuade them to arm? Is it to support the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Bill? Is it to rivet the bolts or guard the dungeons of their fellow-citizens, who, torn from their homes and families, vainly demand that trial by jury which, by proving their innocence, must establish its guilt, that I should persuade them to arm? Is it that a vile pander of national honor and legislative duty should be invested with uncontrolled power over the opinions and persons of an injured, gallant, and generous people, that I should persuade them to arm? Go, impotents, to the Catholics, whose elevated hopes of all glorious freedom you have been appointed to blast! Hence, contemptible Administration, from those you have insulted and levelled to those you have raised! Go to the monopolists of the representation of Ireland and ask them to arm. Go to the swarms of petty tyrants, perjured grand jury robbers, army-contractors, tithe-proctors, and land-sharks, and tell them how necessary it is for them to be armed. The Volunteers have been discouraged because they