to destroy her.  History tends to be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it:  a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day.  To these it may well seem that it matters little whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary as the Wars of the Roses.  It was not so:  we fought for something real when we fought for the old world against the new.  If we want to know painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and very awful door, on a scene which was called Ireland, but which then might well have been called hell.

Having chosen our part and made war upon the new world, we were soon made to understand what such spiritual infanticide involved; and were committed to a kind of Massacre of the Innocents.  In Ireland the young world was represented by young men, who shared the democratic dream of the Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot of Pitt; who was working a huge machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England.  There was present every coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere abbots of misrule.  The stiff and self-conscious figure of Pitt has remained standing incongruously purse in hand; while his manlier rivals were stretching out their hands for the sword, the only possible resort of men who cannot be bought and refuse to be sold.  A rebellion broke out and was repressed; and the government that repressed it was ten times more lawless than the rebellion.  Fate for once seemed to pick out a situation in plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy of appalling platitudes.  The heroes were really heroes; and the villains were nothing but villains.  The common tangle of life, in which good men do evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident, seemed suspended for us as for a judgment.  We had to do things that not only were vile, but felt vile.  We had to destroy men who not only were noble, but looked noble.  They were men like Wolfe Tone, a statesman in the grand style who was not suffered to found a state; and Robert Emmet, lover of his land and of a woman, in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle grace of the young Napoleon.  But he was luckier than the young Napoleon; for he has remained young.  He was hanged; not before he had uttered one of those phrases that are the hinges of history.  He made an epitaph of the refusal of an epitaph:  and with a gesture has hung his tomb in heaven like Mahomet’s coffin.  Against such Irishmen we could only produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to have been made famous solely that they might be infamous.  He sold his own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and has