ieve their ends without violence, while the large majority of the
Volunteers themselves were still as loyal to the Crown as the
Catholics, and were inclined, therefore, to shrink from action which,
although in itself not in the remotest degree connected with dynastic
questions, involved a theoretical conflict with the Crown, and perhaps
an actual collision with Royal troops. One of the last acts of the
Volunteer Convention, before its dissolution, was to pass an address to
the King expressing fervent zeal for the Crown, reminding him of their
quiet and dignified behaviour in the past, and praying that "their
humble wish to have certain manifest perversions of the Parliamentary
representation of this kingdom remedied by the Legislature in some
reasonable degree, might not be imputed to any spirit of innovation in
them, but to a sober and laudable desire to uphold the Constitution, to
confirm the satisfaction of their fellow-subjects, and to perpetuate the
cordial union of the two kingdoms." This document might have been copied
_mutatis mutandis_ from the American petitions prior to the war, and was
to be reproduced almost word for word in Canadian petitions dealing with
less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did
actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly
says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history."
Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a
vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that
time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of
many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and
the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."

The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in
the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in
the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial
transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants
into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe
war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion
itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because
you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a
people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature,
visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the
strong figure of Fitzgibbo