ent; and if
a Reform Bill had been passed making the House of Commons really
representative, the society would never have been anything but a
perfectly legal and harmless association. Of course it is always
possible to suggest what might have been; but in this case it is far
more probable that if Parliament had been so reformed as to be a fair
reflex of the opinion of the country, it would immediately have passed
a resolution declaring Ireland a Republic and forming an alliance with
France; for whatever objects were stated in public, the real guiding
spirits of the United Irish Society from the beginning (as of other
societies of a later date with equally innocent names) were ardent
republicans, who joined the society in order to further those views;
it is absurd to suggest that men who were actually in correspondence
with the leaders of the Directory and were trying to bring about an
invasion from France in order to aid them in establishing a Republic
on Jacobin lines would have been deterred by the passing of a Bill
making it lawful for Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament. Nor again
is it reasonable to contend that earnest-minded Roman Catholics would,
in consequence of the failure of such a Bill to become law, have
rebelled against a Government under which they were able to exercise
their religion in peace and which was at that moment founding and
endowing a College for the training of candidates for the priesthood,
in favour of one which had confiscated the seminaries and was sending
the priests to the guillotine. The fact seems to have been that the
society was formed by Presbyterians, for political reasons; they tried
to get the Roman Catholics to join them, but the lower class Roman
Catholics cared very little about seats in Parliament; so the founders
of the society cleverly added abolition of tithes and taxes, and
reduction of rents, to their original programme; this drew in numbers
of Roman Catholics, whose principles were really the very antithesis
of Jacobinism.

It is a fair instance of the confusion which has always reigned
throughout Irish politics, that after the Relief Act of 1793 had been
passed, the Catholic Committee expressed their jubilation by voting
L2,000 for a statue to the King, and presenting a gold medal to their
Secretary, Wolfe Tone, who was at that moment scheming to set up a
Jacobin Republic.

This celebrated man, Wolfe Tone, was not unlike many others who have
posed as Irish patriot