to the House of Stuart than the O'Haras and Macmahons, on whose support
the fortunes of that House now seemed to depend.

The fixed purpose of these men was to break the foreign yoke, to
exterminate the Saxon colony, to sweep away the Protestant Church, and
to restore the soil to its ancient proprietors. To obtain these ends
they would without the smallest scruple have risen up against James;
and to obtain these ends they rose up for him. The Irish Jacobites,
therefore, were not at all desirous that he should again reign at
Whitehall: for they could not but be aware that a Sovereign of Ireland,
who was also Sovereign of England, would not, and, even if he would,
could not, long administer the government of the smaller and poorer
kingdom in direct opposition to the feeling of the larger and richer.
Their real wish was that the Crowns might be completely separated, and
that their island might, whether under James or without James they cared
little, form a distinct state under the powerful protection of France.

While one party in the Council at Dublin regarded James merely as a tool
to be employed for achieving the deliverance of Ireland, another party
regarded Ireland merely as a tool to be employed for effecting the
restoration of James. To the English and Scotch lords and gentlemen who
had accompanied him from Brest, the island in which they sojourned was
merely a stepping stone by which they were to reach Great Britain.
They were still as much exiles as when they were at Saint Germains; and
indeed they thought Saint Germains a far more pleasant place of exile
than Dublin Castle. They had no sympathy with the native population of
the remote and half barbarous region to which a strange chance had led
them. Nay, they were bound by common extraction and by common language
to that colony which it was the chief object of the native population
to root out. They had indeed, like the great body of their countrymen,
always regarded the aboriginal Irish with very unjust contempt, as
inferior to other European nations, not only in acquired knowledge, but
in natural intelligence and courage; as born Gibeonites who had been
liberally treated, in being permitted to hew wood and to draw water for
a wiser and mightier people. These politicians also thought,--and here
they were undoubtedly in the right,--that, if their master's object was
to recover the throne of England, it would be madness in him to give
himself up to the guidance o