less serious grievances whose neglect at the hands of the Government did
actually lead to armed rebellion. It must be taken, as Mr. Lecky truly
says, as the "defence of the Convention before the bar of history."
Drawn up by the most moderate and least prescient leaders, it was a
vindication of the past, not a pledge for the future; for "from that
time," as Mr. Lecky writes, "the conviction sank deep into the minds of
many that reform in Ireland could only be effected by revolution, and
the rebellion of 1798 might be already foreseen."

The story of that transition, with all its disastrous consequences in
the denationalization of Ireland, in the arrest of healing forces, in
the reawakening of slumbering bigotries and hatreds, in the artificial
transformation of Catholics into anti-English rebels, and Protestants
into anti-Irish Loyalists, in the long agony of the land war, the tithe
war, the Church war, and the loathsome savageries of the rebellion
itself, is one of the most repulsive in history. It is repulsive because
you can watch, as it were, upon a dissecting-table the moral fibre of a
people, from no inherent germ of decay, against reason, against nature,
visibly wasting under a corrosive acid. Typical figures stand out: the
strong figure of Fitzgibbon, voicing ascendancy in its crudest and
ugliest form; at the other extreme the ardent but inadequate figure of
Wolfe Tone, affirming in words which expressed the literal truth of the
case that "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break
the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our
political evils, and to assert the independence of my country--these
were my objects." Midway stands Grattan, the defeated and disillusioned
"Girondin," as Mr. Fisher aptly calls him,[17] blind until it was too
late to the errors which plunged his country into anarchy, and retiring
in despair when he saw that anarchy coming. And on the other side of the
water, Pitt, dispassionately prescribing for Ireland in 1784, while