My mind has been confirmed in this opinion by the experience of every succeeding year, and the conclusions which I have drawn from every fact before my eyes."

He was

He asked to be shot. He was refused. ordered to be hanged on November 12. On November 11 he cut his throat with a pen-knife. He lived till November 19.

Of few Irish leaders is there such a full personal memorial as Wolfe Tone has left in his autobiography. From this book, and from the history of his time, we can judge his character and his disposition, his philosophy and his practice, his hopes and dreams. In its personal vividness it is an alluring story. His lovestory is one of the most charming ever recorded. His picture of Paris in 1796 has drawn warm admiration from so severe a critic as Lecky. But it is for the qualities of mind that Wolfe Tone brought to Irish strategy that he is most to be remembered. Wolfe Tone was not a sentimentalist or a theorist, neither was he a callous realist. He was a candid, critical, imaginative, and resolute man who set himself about the complicated and heroic task of freeing Ireland. He came nearer complete success than any other man in modern times.

Barry O'Brien quotes one interesting witness. "Wolfe Tone," said the Duke of Wellington, “was a most extraordinary man, and his history is the most curious history of those times. With a hundred guineas in his pocket, unknown and unrecommended, he went to Paris in order to overturn the British government in Ireland. He asked for a large force, Lord Edward Fitzgerald for a small force. They listened to Tone."

With the death of Tone the insurrection of 1798 expired. "In a cause like this," he had said, "success is everything. Washington succeeded, and Kosciusko failed." But his tenacity, his clarity, his ardor, his courage, remained to inspire his countrymen. And it could never be forgotten that he had unselfishly and unreservedly espoused the cause of the people. With all his deep and fine seriousness he had, moreover, a touching simplicity. At thirty-three he wrote, "I will endeavor to keep myself as pure as I can, as to the means. As to the end, it is sacred-the liberty and independence of my country first, the establishment of my wife and our darling babies next, and last, I hope, a well-earned reputation."

He was thirty-five years old when he died.

228

CHAPTER IX

THE UNION AND THE REPEAL MOVEMENT

1

HE rebellion of '98 was at last suppressed,"

TH

observes Lecky, "and the ministers determined to avail themselves of the opportunity to annihilate the Irish parliament."

One main reason for this annihilation, curiously enough, was the pressure of the non-represented Catholics. It was no longer pretended by English statesmen that the native Irish could be kept out of parliament forever. A century of servitude had been forced on them, but the French Revolution had stirred their numb political instincts, and the day of crass penal laws was at an end. To admit them fully, however, was to make parliament popular and national. The British or English governing class could not tolerate the idea of a national Ireland. Seriously lacking in foresight and obsessed with No Popery, the cabinet could imagine no better way to dispose of Ireland than to smother it in a union.

Wolfe Tone had long seen these underlying realities. He knew, and the United Irishmen knew, that England had no policy except to submerge, if necessary destroy, the Irish nation. Hence he and his companions had worked hard to organize the Catholic Irish. Through Edmund Burke's son Richard (a “puppy”), John Keogh, the leading man of the Catholic commercial classes, and others, every effort had been made to stir the will of the masses. The Government, on its side, had played two clever counter-games. One was to keep the ascendancy of the Protestants an irritated issue, both for the Anglo-Irish and the Orangemen. The other was to buy off the more genteel and respectable Catholics. Among those "Shoneen" Catholics, Wolfe Tone had moved as a national diplomat, and with great success; but the failure of the insurrection of 1798 gave the Government the trump it was looking for.

That insurrection was a Government asset. It became an asset the moment it was given the aspect of mob violence. By removing the leaders at the last minute, having previously quartered the soldiers on the people to search for arms, torture, flog, rape, and burn houses and chapels, the right mood of insane desperation had not been so hard to produce in

Leinster. Honest Abercromby was a hindrance, but Abercromby was deleted. "The fact is incontrovertible," Lord Holland said, "the people of Ireland were driven into resistance, which possibly they meditated before, by the free quarters and the excesses of the soldiers, which were such as are not permitted in civilized warfare, even in an enemy's country."

Nothing played better into the hands of the English than the fact that priests led the people in Wexford. Another valuable item was a sequence of atrocities in Wexford, on both sides, by which it appeared that a wicked Native Mutiny was threatening the Protestant ascendancy. In the medley of passions-passions of pride and property-which this phantasm excited, the Government triumphed heavily. The United Irishmen's controlled revolution had been turned into a brawl and a shambles. It had made Ireland a slaughterhouse. Fifty thousand, gentle and simple, had been killed. The Government, which had created a White Terror, retained the prestige of dominance.

But the struggle had forced England to shed one moral garment after another. It was now stripped to the sheer buff of brutality. The English executive in Dublin Castle had used the Anglo-Irish parliament as its bailiff. It had inflamed the feeling of ascendancy