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 there ever been a moment when Protestant Ulstermen, heirs of the noble Volunteer spirit, once represented in such a Parliament, would have acted on the assumption that they had to meet a policy of revenge.  Nevertheless, Fitzgibbonism did succeed, as it was to succeed in Canada, in making pessimism at least plausible and in achieving an immense amount of direct ascertainable mischief.

The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal three generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened under the operations of economic forces connected with race and religion, yet perfectly capable of adjustment by a wise and instructed Government, yawned wide from 1798 onwards, when Government had become a soulless policeman, and scenes of frenzy and slaughter had occurred which could not be forgotten.  Swept asunder by a power outside their control, Protestants and Catholics stood henceforth in opposite political camps, and it became a fixed article of British policy to govern Ireland by playing upon this antagonism.  The flame of the Volunteer spirit never perished, but it dwindled to a spark under the irresistible weight of a manufactured reaction.  Dissenters and Anglicans united, not to lead the way in securing better conditions for their Catholic fellow-countrymen, not for the interests of Ireland as a whole, but under the ignoble colours of religious fanaticism.  Hence that strangely artificial alliance between the landlords of the South and West and the democratic tenantry, artisans, and merchants of the North; an alliance formed to meet an imaginary danger, and kept in being with the most mischievous results to the social and economic development of Ireland.  Since the Protestant minority had made up its mind to depend once more on the English power it had defied in 1782, the old machine of Ascendancy, which had showed certain manifest signs of decrepitude under Grattan’s Parliament, was reconstructed on a firmer, less corrupt, and more lasting basis.