and coercion as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their need for more coercion.  Anticipating a certain limited class of Irishmen of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he used to bewail English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance of the incurable criminality of his own kith and kin.  He was just as immovably cynical about the vast majority of his own co-religionists as about the conquered race.  If, as was obvious, so far from fearing the revenge of the Catholics, their unimpeded instinct was to take sides with them to secure good government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who could not see the doom awaiting them.  Yet Fitzgibbon’s admirers must admit that his consistency was not complete.  He was perfectly cognizant of the real causes of Irish discontent.  He was aware of the grievances of Ulster, and his description of the conditions of the Munster peasantry in the Whiteboy debates of 1787 is classical.  If pressed, he would have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and the condition of its maintenance.  That other strange lapse in 1798, when he described the unparalleled prosperity of Ireland since 1782 under a Constitution which, in the Union debates of 1800, he afterwards covered with deserved ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points.

These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive coherence of his doctrine.  He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of the Empire.  The theory, of course, extends much farther than the bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it.  It was used, as we shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada 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.