.

CIVIL WAR.

The passionate excitement which the news of the Ulster massacre had
awakened in England seems to have deepened, rather than diminished, as
time went on, and the details became more known. Nothing that has
happened within living memory can be even approximately compared to it,
though, perhaps, those who are old enough to remember the sensations
awakened by the news of the Indian Mutiny will be able most nearly to
realize the wrath and passionate desire of revenge which filled every
Protestant breast. That the circumstances of the case were not taken
into consideration was almost inevitable. Looking back with calmer
vision--though even now a good deal of fog and misconception seems to
prevail upon the subject--we can see that some such outbreak was all but
inevitable; might have been, indeed ought to have been, foreseen. A
wildly-excitable population driven from the land which they and their
fathers had held from time immemorial, confined to a narrow and, for the
most part, a worthless tract; seeing others in possession of these "fat
lands" which they still regarded as their own--exiled to make room for
planters of another race and another faith--what, in the name of sense
or reason, was to be expected except what happened? That the very
instant protection was withdrawn the hour for retribution would be felt
to have struck. The unhappy Protestant colonists were absolutely
guiltless in the matter. They were simply the victims, as the earlier
proprietors had been the victims before them. The wrongs that had been
wrought thirty years earlier by Sir John Davis and the Dublin lawyers
had been wiped out in their unoffending blood.

This point is so important to realize, and the whole rising has so often
been described as a purely religious and fanatical one, that it is worth
dwelling upon it a minute or two longer. It was a rising,
unquestionably, of a native Roman Catholic community against an
introduced Protestant one, and the religious element, no doubt, counted
for something--though it is not easy to say for how much--in the matter.
In any case it was the smallest least vital part of the long gathered
fury which resulted in that deed of vengeance. The rising was
essentially an agrarian one--as almost every Irish rising has been
before and since--and the fact that the two rival creeds found
themselves face to face was little more than a very unfortunate
accident. Could the plantations of James the First's t