in his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the place of
his birth and education; and to the last he had in it "a dearness of
instinct more than he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs
of Ireland had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two
critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likely
to find for describing in a few words what were the issues. The brief
space can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer,
for Ireland had furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of
English statesmen.

[Footnote 1: Fronde's _Ireland_, ii. 214.]

Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England just
what the American colonies would have been, if they had contained,
besides the European settlers, more than twice their number of
unenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great rebellion of
Tyrconnel by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was
confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal
Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and the
grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness and
completeness. The Protestants and landlords were supreme; the peasants
and the Catholics were prostrate in despair. The Revolution brought
about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England. Here
it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of a
small sect. There it made a small sect supreme over the body of the
nation. "It was, to say the truth," Burke wrote, "not a revolution but
a conquest," and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and
normal system of government. The last conquest of England was in the
eleventh century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of
the seventeenth.