purely selfish and strategic reasons, without effective command of the
sea, and with the stain of the Terror upon her, was of little material
value and a grave moral handicap to the Irish Revolutionists. It is the
manner of Tone's failure and the consequences of his failure that have
such a tragic interest. A united Ireland could have dispensed with the
aid of France. What prevented unity? Tone laboured to bring both creeds
together, and to a certain degree was successful. Until the very last it
was the Catholics, not the Protestants, who shrank most from revolution.
Yet, in the Rebellion of 1798, the North never moved, while Catholic
Wexford and Wicklow rose.

The root cause is to be found in those agrarian abuses whose long
neglect by the Irish Parliament constituted the strongest justification
for Reform. The Orange Society, founded under that name in 1795,
originated in the "Peep o' Day Boys," a local association formed in
Armagh in 1784 for the purpose of bullying Catholics. There is no doubt
that the underlying incentive was economic. Even when the Penal Code had
lost in efficacy, its results survived in the low standard of living of
the persecuted Catholics. As I pointed out in a former chapter, the
reckless cupidity of the landlords in terminating leases and fixing new
rents by auction, with the alternative of eviction, threw those
Protestant tenants who did not emigrate into direct competition with
Catholic peasants of a lower economic stamp, who because they lived on
little could afford to offer fancy rents. Hence much bitter friction,
leading to sordid village rows and eventually to the organized
ruffianism of the Peep o' Day Boys. The Catholic Franchise Act of 1793,
unaccompanied by Emancipation, actually intensified the trouble by
removing the landlord's motive to prefer a Protestant tenant on account
of his vote. Under ill-treatment, the Catholics naturally retaliated
with a society known as the "Defenders," and in some districts were
themselves the aggressors. Defenderism, in its purely agrarian aspect,
spread to other parts of Ireland, where Protestants were few, and became
merged in Whiteboyism. This had always been an agrarian movement,
directed against abuses which the law refused to touch, and without
religious animus, although the overwhelming numbers of the Catholics in
the regions where it flourished would have placed the Protestants at
their mercy. In Ulster both the contending organizations nec