monuments every where met the eye
of the Irish Roman Catholics. In front of the Senate House of their
country, they saw the statue of their conqueror. If they entered, they
saw the walls tapestried with the defeats of their fathers. At length,
after a hundred years of servitude, endured without one vigorous or
combined struggle for emancipation, the French revolution awakened a
wild hope in the bosoms of the oppressed. Men who had inherited all the
pretensions and all the passions of the Parliament which James had held
at the Kings Inns could not hear unmoved of the downfall of a wealthy
established Church, of the flight of a splendid aristocracy, of the
confiscation of an immense territory. Old antipathies, which had never
slumbered, were excited to new and terrible energy by the combination
of stimulants which, in any other society, would have counteracted each
other. The spirit of Popery and the spirit of Jacobinism, irreconcilable
antagonists every where else, were for once mingled in an unnatural
and portentous union. Their joint influence produced the third and
last rising up of the aboriginal population against the colony. The
greatgrandsons of the soldiers of Galmoy and Sarsfield were opposed to
the greatgrandsons of the soldiers of Wolseley and Mitchelburn. The Celt
again looked impatiently for the sails which were to bring succour from
Brest; and the Saxon was again backed by the whole power of England.
Again the victory remained with the well educated and well organized
minority. But, happily, the vanquished people found protection in
a quarter from which they would once have had to expect nothing but
implacable severity. By this time the philosophy of the eighteenth
century had purifed English Whiggism from that deep taint of intolerance
which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the
Puritanism of the seventeenth century. Enlightened men had begun to feel
that the arguments by which Milton and Locke, Tillotson and Burnet, had
vindicated the rights of conscience might be urged with not less force
in favour of the Roman Catholic than in favour of the Independent or
the Baptist. The great party which traces its descent through the
Exclusionists up to the Roundheads continued during thirty years, in
spite of royal frowns and popular clamours, to demand a share in all
the benefits of our free constitution for those Irish Papists whom the
Roundheads and the Exclusionists had considered merely a