It is pure dilettantism, again, to seek the moral of Irish commotions in the insurrection of La Vendee.  That, as somebody has said, was like a rising of the ancient Gauls at the voice of the Druids, and led by their great chiefs.  It will be time enough to compare La Vendee with Ireland when the peasantry take the field against the British Government with Beresfords, Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head.  If the Vendeans had risen to drive out the Charettes, the Bonchamps, the Larochejacquelins, the parallel would have been nearer the mark.  The report of the Devon Commission, the green pamphlet containing an account of the famous three days’ discussion between O’Connell and Butt in the Dublin Corporation In 1843, or half a dozen of Lord Clare’s speeches between 1793 and 1800, will give a clearer insight into the Irish problem than a bushel of books about the Vendean or any other episode of the Revolution.

Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose of practical enlightenment, to draw parallels between the action of the Catholic clergy in Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy on the eve of the Revolution.  There is no sort of force in the argument that because the French clergy fared ill at the Revolution,[1] therefore the Irish clergy will fare ill when self-government is bestowed on Ireland.  Such talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, without any of the foundations of a true historical analogy.  The differences between the two cases are obvious, and they go to the heart of the matter.  For instance, the men who came to the top of affairs in France were saturated both with speculative unbelief for one thing, and with active hatred of the Church for another.  In Ireland, on the contrary, there is no speculative unbelief, as O’Connell used so constantly to boast; and the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely national and popular, has nourished none of those gross and swollen abuses which provoked the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary France.  In truth, it is with precisely as much or as little reason that most of the soothsayers and prognosticators of evil take the directly opposite line.  Instead of France these persons choose, as they have an equally good right to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or South America.  Why not?  They assure us, in their jingling phrase, that Home Rule means Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry, superstition, and obscurantism.  One of these two mutually destructive predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no more.  We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as they are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and fantastical analogies.

[Footnote 1:  The Church did not fare so very ill, after all.  The State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to the tune of 130,000,000 livres, and assured it an annual Budget of rather more than that amount.—­Boiteau’s Etat de la France, p. 202.]