r, I agree
with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode,
especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.

The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before
1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever
possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's
middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling
fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had
been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers,
in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at
the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had
urged--what a grim irony it seems!--to give "unanswerable proofs that
the cases of Ireland and England are different," and who answered with
truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained "by
force or corruption." Every succeeding year showed the same results.
Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his
Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary
organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive
which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland. Since the symbol
of the Irish Executive was the British Crown, he, of course, abjured the
Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the
American or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from the
first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Tolerance to him was
not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy. He took
little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing
its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually
ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to
the poll by their Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme
Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling
franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most
sober political common sense.

His aim was to unite Irishmen of all creeds to overthrow a Government
which did not emanate from or represent them, and which was ruinous to
them. It is not surprising that he failed. Ireland was very near
England. French intervention had been decisive in distant America, and
the French Revolution in its turn had been hastened by the American
example. But the intervention in Ireland of Republican France, for