anti-type in ideas and aims, his inferior in intellect, his superior in
morals, but no more than his rival in sincerity, clarity, and
consistency of ideas. Clare was a product of the Penal Code, the son of
a Catholic Irishman who, to obtain a legal career, had become a
Protestant. He himself was not a bigot, but a very able cynic, with a
definite theory of government. Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so
much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to
say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland,
and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again;
that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the
tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial
fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side,
revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous
speech on the Union, the settlers to the third and fourth generation
"were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island." "Laws must be
framed to meet the vicious propensities of human nature," and laws of
this sort for the case of Ireland should, he held with unanswerable
logic, properly be made in England, not by the travesty of a Parliament
in Ireland, which, in so far as it was in any degree Irish, had shown
faint but ominous tendencies towards tolerance and the reunion of
Irishmen. He never took the trouble to demonstrate the truth of his
theory of revenge by a reasoned analysis of Irish symptoms. He took it
for granted as part of a universal axiomatic truth, and, like all
philosophers of his school, pointed to the results of misgovernment and
coercion as proofs of the innate depravity of the governed and of their
need for more coercion. Anticipating a certain limited class of Irishmen
of to-day, often brilliant lawyers like himself, he used to bewail
English ignorance of Ireland, meaning ignorance of the incurable
criminality of his own kith and kin. He was just as immovably cynical
about the vast majority of his own co-religionists as about the