n, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and
ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of
Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the
case that "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break
the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our
political evils, and to assert the independence of my country--these
were my objects." Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned
"Girondin," as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too
late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring
in despair when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of the
water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while
there was yet time, the radical remedy, Reform, patiently turning, when
that was refused, to palliatives like mutual free trade in 1785 and the
Catholic franchise in 1793; and meanwhile, with an undercurrent of cool
scepticism, preparing the ground for the only alternative to Reform,
short of a revolutionary separation of the two countries, legislative
Union, and remorselessly pushing that Union through by the only
available means, bribery.

In this wretched story we seek in vain for individual scapegoats.
Tracing events to their source, we strike against two obstructions,
proximity and ignorance, and we may as well make them our scapegoats. If
proximity had implied knowledge and forbearance, all would have been
well, but it implied just the reverse, and prohibited the kind of
solution which, after very much the same sort of crisis, and in the
teeth of ignorance and error, was afterwards reached in the case of
Canada and South Africa.

The immediate cause is clear. The failure of Reform is the key to the
Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan's
Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy,
Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have
preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that
Parliament did rather than on the enormous evils which it not only left
untouched, but scarcely observed. We must remember that it was not only
a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an infusion of
lawyers and others devoted to the interest of landlords. In that
capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much less of remedying, the
gravest material ills of Ireland. In the very narrow domain where the
la