very which had pressed on him ever since the
Battle of the Boyne.

[Sidenote: The United Irishmen.]

To such an emancipation Pitt was already looking forward. In 1792, a
year before the outbreak of war with France, he forced on the Irish
Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the electoral
franchise and to civil and military office within the island, which
promised a new era of religious liberty. But the promise came too late.
The hope of conciliation was lost in the fast rising tide of religious
and social passion. As the dream of obtaining Parliamentary reform died
away the United Irishmen of the North drifted into projects of
insurrection and a correspondence with France. The news of the French
Revolution fell with a yet more terrible effect on the Catholic
peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs. Their discontent
broke out in social disorder, in the outrages of secret societies of
"Defenders" and "Peep o' Day Boys," which spread panic among the ruling
classes. It was only by sheer terror and bloodshed that the Protestant
landowners, who banded together in "Orange" societies to meet the secret
societies about them, could hold the country down. Outrages on the one
side, tyranny on the other, deepened the disorder and panic every day,
and the hopes of the reformers grew fainter as the terror rose fast
around them. The maddened Protestants scouted all notions of further
concessions to men whom they looked upon as on the verge of revolt; and
Grattan's motions for reform were defeated by increasing majorities. On
the other hand the entry of the anti-revolutionary Whigs into Pitt's
ministry revived Grattan's hopes, for Burke and his followers were
pledged to a liberal policy towards Ireland, and Lord Fitzwilliam, who
came over as viceroy in 1794, encouraged Grattan to bring in a bill for
the entire emancipation of the Catholics at the opening of the next
year. Such a step can hardly have been taken without Pitt's assent; but
the minister was now swept along by a tide of feeling which he could not
control. The Orangemen threatened revolt, the Tories in Pitt's own
Cabinet recoiled from the notion of reform, and Lord Fitzwilliam was not
only recalled, but replaced by Lord Camden, an avowed enemy of all
change or concession to the Catholics. From that moment the United
Irishmen became a revolutionary society; and one of their leaders, Wolfe
Tone, made his way to France, in the spring of 1796, to