kened with the
horrors he was forbidden to avert. "Within these twelve months," he
wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation,
"every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or
Calmucks has been transacted here.... The struggle has been, in the
first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or
nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to
be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility
of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have
for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not
avow or sanction."

Abercromby's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, "took away the last
faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now
supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the
forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He
had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events,
foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual
writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black
granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his
anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in
morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and
consistency of ideas. Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of
a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a
Protestant. He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a
definite theory of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so
much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to
say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland,
and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again;
that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the
tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial
fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side,
revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous
speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation
"were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island." "Laws must be
framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of
this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable
logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Pa