savagery of such a mob as had set fire to the barn
at Scullabogue, or murdered the prisoners at Rossbridge, should have
been filled with a fury which carried them far beyond the necessities of
the case is hardly perhaps surprising, but the result was to hurry them
in many instances into cruelties fully as great as those which they
intended to avenge.

It was at this moment, while the country was still racked and bleeding
at every pore from the effects of the recent struggle, that Pitt
resolved to carry out his long projected plan of a legislative Union.
Public opinion in Ireland may be said for the moment to have been dead.
The mass of the people were lying crushed and exhausted by their own
violence. Fresh from a contest waged with gun and pike and torch, a mere
constitutional struggle had probably little or no interest for them. The
popular enthusiasm which the earlier triumphs of the Irish Parliament
had awakened had all but utterly died away in a fratricidal struggle. To
the leaders of the late rebellion it was an object of open contempt, if
not indeed of actual aversion. Wolfe Tone, the ablest man by far on the
revolutionary side, had never weaned of pouring contempt upon it. In his
eyes it was the great opponent of progress, the venal slave which had
not only destroyed the chances of a successful outbreak, and whose
endeavour had been to keep Ireland under the heel of her tyrant. To him
the opposition as little deserved the name of patriot as the veriest
place-men. Grattan, throughout his long and noble career had been as
steadily loyal, and as steadily averse to any appeal to force as any
paid creature of the Government. To men who only wanted to break loose
from England altogether, to found an Irish republic as closely as
possible upon the model then offered for their imitation in France,
anything like mere constitutional opposition seemed not contemptible
merely, but ridiculous.

[Illustration: VIEW OF THE FOUR COURTS, DUBLIN, FINISHED THE YEAR OF THE
UNION, 1800.]

This explains how it was that no great burst of public feeling--such as
a few years before would have made the project of a Union all but
impossible--was now to be feared. Pitt had for a long time firmly fixed
his mind upon it as the object to be attained. He honestly believed the
existing state of things to be fraught with peril for England, and to
have in it formidable elements of latent danger, which a war or any
other sudden emergency might