although, once aflame, it inevitably took a sectarian turn. Several of
the prominent leaders were Protestants. Priests naturally joined in it
because they were the only friends the people had had in the dark ages
of oppression. In so far as it can be regarded as spontaneous, it was of
Whiteboy origin, anti-tithe and anti-rack-rent. But it was not even
spontaneous; that is another dreadful and indisputable fact which
emerges. The barbarous measures taken to repress and disarm, prior to
the outbreak, together with the skilfully propagated reports of a coming
massacre by Orangemen, would have goaded any peasantry in the world to
revolt, and the only astonishing thing is that the revolt was so local
and sporadic. General Sir Ralph Abercromby retired, sickened with the
horrors he was forbidden to avert. "Within these twelve months," he
wrote of the conduct of the soldiery at the time of his resignation,
"every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or
Calmucks has been transacted here.... The struggle has been, in the
first place, whether I was to have the command of the Army really or
nominally, and then whether the character and discipline of it were to
be degraded and ruined in the mode of using it, either from the facility
of one man or from the violence and oppression of a set of men who have
for more than twelve months employed it in measures which they durst not
avow or sanction."

Abercromby's resignation, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, "took away the last
faint chance of averting a rebellion." Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, was now
supreme in the Government, and henceforth represents incarnate the
forces which provoked the Rebellion and founded upon it the Union. He
had bided his time for a decade, watching the trend of events,
foreseeing their outcome, and smiling sardonically at the ineffectual
writhings of the men of compromise. He stands out like a block of black
granite over against the slender figure of Wolfe Tone, who was his