essarily
acquired a religious form and necessarily retained it. But at bottom bad
laws, not bigotry, were the cause. There was nothing incurable, or even
unique, about the disorders. Analogous phenomena have appeared
elsewhere, for example, in Australia, between the original squatters on
large ranches and new and more energetic colonists in search of land for
closer settlement. Under a rational system of tenure and distribution
there was plenty of good land in Ireland for an even larger population.
Tone, who was a middle-class lawyer, seems never to have appreciated
what was going on. So far from healing the schism, he appears to have
widened it by throwing the United Irish Committee of Ulster into the
scale of the Catholics against the Orangemen. But, in truth, he was
helpless. Good administration only could unite these distracted
elements, and without the Reform for which he battled, good
administration was impossible. The dissension, widening and acquiring an
increasingly religious and racial character, paralyzed Ulster, which
originally was the seat of the Revolution. The forces normally at work
to favour law and order--loyalty to the Crown, dislike of the French
Revolution, and resentment at Franco-Irish conspiracies--gathered
proportionately greater strength.

The Southern Rebellion of 1798--a mad, pitiful thing at the best, the
work of half-starved peasants into whose stunted minds the splendid
ideal of Tone had scarcely begun to penetrate--was a totally different
sort of rebellion from any he had contemplated. It was neither national
nor Republican. The French invasions had met with little support; the
first with positive reprobation. Nor was it in origin sectarian,
although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of
the prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined in it
because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages
of oppression. In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of
Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even
spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which
emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to
the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming
massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the world to
revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local
and sporadic. General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sic