are other questions. As between their political system and that of Burke, Grattan and O'Connell, there always will be, probably, among their countrymen, very decided differences of opinion. That is but natural: but as to the personal and political virtues of the United Irishmen there can be no difference; the world has never seen a more sincere or more self-sacrificing generation.

CHAPTER XVIII.

ADMINISTRATION OF LORD CORNWALLIS--BEFORE THE UNION.

"Nothing strengthens a dynasty," said the first Napoleon, "more than an unsuccessful rebellion." The partial uprising; of the Irish people in 1798 was a rebellion of this class, and the use of such a failure to an able and unscrupulous administration, was illustrated in the extinction of the ancient legislature of the kingdom, before the recurrence of the third, anniversary of the insurrection.

This project, the favourite and long-cherished design of Mr. Pitt, was cordially approved by his principal colleagues, the Duke of Portland, Lord Grenville, and Mr. Dundas; indeed, it may be questioned whether it was not as much Lord Grenville's design as Pitt's, and as much George the Third's personal project as that of any of his ministers. The old King's Irish policy was always of the most narrow and illiberal description. In his memorandum on the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, he explains his views with the business-like brevity which characterized all his communications with his ministers while he retained possession of his faculties; he was totally opposed to Lord Fitzwilliam's emancipation policy, which he thought adopted "in implicit obedience to the heated imagination of Mr. Burke." To Lord Camden his instructions were, "to support the old English interest as well as the Protestant religion," and to Lord Cornwallis, that no further "indulgence could be granted to Catholics," but that he should steadily pursue the object of effecting the union of Ireland and England.

The new Viceroy entered heartily into the views of his Sovereign. Though unwilling to exchange his English position as a Cabinet Minister and Master-General of Ordnance for the troubled life of a Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, he at length allowed himself to be persuaded into the acceptance of that office, with a view mainly to carrying the Union. He was ambitious to connect his name with that great imperial measure, so often projected, but never formally proposed. If he could only succeed in incorporating the Irish with the British legislature, he declared he would feel satisfied to retire from all other public employments; that he would look on his day as finished, and his evening of ease and dignity fully earned. He was not wholly unacquainted with the kingdom against which he cherished these ulterior views; for he had been, nearly thirty years before, when he fell under the lash of _Junius_, one of the Vice-Treasurers of Ireland. For the rest he was a man of great information, tact, and firmness; indefatigable in business; tolerant by temperament and conviction; but both as a general and a politician it was his lot to be identified in India and in Ireland with successes which might better have been failures, and in America, with failures which were much more beneficial to mankind than his successes.

In his new sphere of action his two principal agents were Lord Clare and Lord Castlereagh, both Irishmen; the Chancellor, the son of what in that country is called a "spoiled priest," and the Secretary, the son of an ex-volunteer, and member of Flood's Reform Convention. It is not possible to regard the conduct of these high officials in undermining and destroying the ancient national legislature of their own country, in the same light as that of Lord Cornwallis, or Mr. Pitt, or Lord Grenville. It was but natural, that as Englishmen, these ministers should consider the empire in the first place; that they should desire to centralize all the resources and all the authority of both Islands in London; that to them the existence of an independent Parliament at Dublin, with its ample control over the courts, the revenues, the defences, and the trade of that kingdom, should appear an obstacle and a hindrance to the unity of the imperial system. From their point of view they were quite right, and had they pursued their end, complete centralization, by honourable means, no stigma could attach to them even in the eyes of Irishmen; but with Lords Clare and Castlereagh the case was wholly different. Born in the land, deriving income as well as existence from the soil, elected to its Parliament by the confidence of their countrymen, attaining to posts of honour in consequence of such election, that they should voluntarily offer their services to establish an alien and a hostile policy on the ruins of their own national constitution, which, with all its defects, was national, and was corrigible; this betrayal of their own, at the dictate of another State, will always place the names of Clare and Castlereagh on the detested list of public traitors. Yet though in such treason, united and identified, no two men could be more unlike in all other respects. Lord Clare was fiery, dogmatic, and uncompromising to the last degree; while Lord Castlereagh was stealthy, imperturbable, insidious, bland, and adroit. The Chancellor endeavoured to carry everything with a high hand, with a bold, defiant, confident swagger; the Secretary, on the contrary, trusted to management, expediency, and silent tenacity of purpose. The one had faith in violence, the other in corruption; they were no inapt personifications of the two chief agencies by which the union was effected--Force and Fraud.

The Irish Parliament, which had been of necessity adjourned during the greater part of the time the insurrection lasted, assembled within a week of Lord Cornwallis' arrival. Both Houses voted highly loyal addresses to the King and Lord-Lieutenant, the latter seconded in the Commons by Charles Kendal Bushe, the college companion of Wolfe Tone! A vote of 100,000 pounds to indemnify those who had suffered from the rebels--subsequently increased to above 1,000,000 pounds--was passed _una voce_; another, placing on the Irish establishment certain English militia regiments, passed with equal promptitude. In July, five consecutive acts--a complete code of penalties and proscription--were introduced, and, after various debates and delays, received the royal sanction on the 6th of October, the last day of the session of 1798. These acts were: 1. The Amnesty Act, the exceptions to which were so numerous "that few of those who took any active part in the rebellion," were, according to the Cornwallis' correspondence, "benefited by it." 2. An Act of Indemnity, by which all magistrates who had "exercised a vigour beyond the law" against the rebels, were protected from the legal consequences of such acts. 3. An act for attainting Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Mr. Harvey, and Mr. Grogan, against which Curran, taking "his instructions from the grave," pleaded at the bar of the House of Lords, but pleaded in vain. (This act was finally reversed by the Imperial Parliament in 1819.) 4. An act forbidding communication between persons in Ireland and those enumerated in the Banishment Act, and making the return to Ireland, after sentence of banishment by a court-martial, a transportable felony. 5. An act to compel fifty-one persons therein named to surrender before 1st of December, 1798, under pain of high treason. Among the fifty-one were the principal refugees at Paris and Hamburg-Tone, Lewines, Tandy, Deane Swift, Major Plunkett, Anthony McCann, Harvey Morres, etc. On the same day in which the session terminated, and the royal sanction was given to these acts, the name of Henry Grattan was, a significant coincidence, formally struck, by the King's commands, from the roll of the Irish Privy Council!

This legislation of the session of 1798, was fatal to the Irish Parliament. The partisans of the Union, who had used the rebellion to discredit the constitution, now used the Parliament to discredit itself. Under the influence of a fierce reactionary spirit, when all merciful and moderate councils were denounced as treasonable, it was not difficult to procure the passage of sweeping measures of proscription. But with their passage vanished the former popularity of the domestic legislature. And what followed? The constitution of '82 could only be upheld in the hearts of the people; and, with all its defects, it had been popular before the sudden spread of French revolutionary notions distracted and dissipated the public opinion which had grown up within the era of independence. To make the once cherished authority, which liberated trade in '79, and half emancipated the Catholics in '93, the last executioner of the vengeance of the Castle against the people, was to place a gulf between it and the affections of that people in the day of trial. To make the anti-unionists in Parliament, such as the Speaker, Sir Lawrence Parsons, Plunkett, Ponsonby and Bushe, personally responsible for this vindictive code, was to disarm them of the power, and almost of the right, to call on the people whom they turned over, bound hand and foot, to the mercy of the minister in '98, to aid them against the machinations of that same minister in '99. The last months of the year were marked besides by events already referred to, and by negotiations incessantly carried on, both in England and Ireland, in favour of the Union. Members of both Houses were personally courted and canvassed by the Prime Minister, the Secretaries of State, the Viceroy and the Irish Secretary. Titles, pensions and offices were freely promised. Vast sums of secret service money, afterwards added as a charge to the public debt of Ireland, were remitted from Whitehall. An army of pamphleteers, marshalled by Under-Secretary Cooke, and confidentially directed by the able but anti-national Bishop of Meath, (Dr. O'Beirne,) and by Lord Castlereagh personally, plied their pens in favour of "the consolidation of the empire." The Lord Chancellor, the Chief Secretary and Mr. Beresford, made journeys to England, to assist the Prime Minister with their local information, and to receive his imperial confidence in return. The Orangemen were neutralized by securing a majority of their leaders; the Catholics, by the