as Pitt and his father Chatham had advocated it. But in Ireland, which
was Catholic and Nonconformist, landed property signified Episcopalian
landed property, that is, the narrowest form of ascendancy. Charlemont
was an even stranger paradox. He was an academic Reformer before
Grattan, but not an Emancipator, arriving at the same sterility as
Grattan through a religious bias which Grattan ceased to feel, a bias
inspired, not by a fanatical fear of democracy in itself, but by a fear
of Catholic revenge for past wrongs. These men and their like, admirable
and lovable as in many respects they were, were useless to Ireland in
those terrible times. Whether Emancipation, unaccompanied by Reform, had
any real chance of passing Parliament in 1795, when the Whig Viceroy
Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever
conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came
over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter
of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under
circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say
with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely
ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish
patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, however, I agree
with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode,
especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it.

The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before
1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever
possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's
middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling
fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had
been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers,
in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at
the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had