anada and South
Africa, and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial
circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Anyone who reads
the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition
rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and
on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty
of "framing laws to meet the vicious propensities of human nature." In a
word, the theory is in essence not so much anti-racial as
anti-democratic, while finding its easiest application where those
distinctions of race and creed exist which it is its effect, though not
its purpose, to intensify and envenom. Fitzgibbon is a repulsive figure.
Yet it would be unjust to single him out for criticism. Like him, the
philosophers Hume and Paley believed in oligarchy, and accepted force or
corruption as its two alternative props. Burke thought the same, though
the Pitts thought otherwise. Fitzgibbon's brutal pessimism was only the
political philosophy of Paley, Hume, and Burke pushed relentlessly in an
exceptional case to its extreme logical conclusion. But we can justly
criticize statesmen of the present day who, after a century's experience
of the refutation of the doctrine in every part of the world, still
adhere to it.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Pitt's original scheme was accepted in Ireland, but defeated in
England, owing to the angry opposition of British commercial interests.
The scheme, as amended to conciliate these interests, was deservedly
rejected in Ireland.

[17] J. Fisher, "The End of the Irish Parliament." The author is much
indebted to this brilliant study, which appeared only this year (1911).

[18] See Fitzgibbon's Speeches in the Irish House of Lords, on the
Catholic Franchise Bill, March 13, 1793, and on the Union, February 10,
1800.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNION

The worst feature of Fitzgibbonism is that it has the power artificially
to produce in the human beings subject to it some of the very phenomena
which originally existed only in the perverted imagination of its
professors. Some only of the phenomena; not all; for human nature
triumphs even over Fitzgibbonism. There has never been a moment since
the Union when a representative Irish Parliament, if statesmen had been
wise and generous enough, to set such a body up, would have acted on the
principle of revenge or persecution. Nor, in spite of all evidences to
the contrary, has the