conquered race. If, as was obvious, so far from fearing the revenge of
the Catholics, their unimpeded instinct was to take sides with them to
secure good government, they were not only traitors, but imbeciles who
could not see the doom awaiting them. Yet Fitzgibbon's admirers must
admit that his consistency was not complete. He was perfectly cognizant
of the real causes of Irish discontent. He was aware of the grievances
of Ulster, and his description of the conditions of the Munster
peasantry in the Whiteboy debates of 1787 is classical. If pressed, he
would have answered, we may suppose, that it was impolitic to cure
evils which were at once the consequence of ascendancy and the
condition of its maintenance. That other strange lapse in 1798, when he
described the unparalleled prosperity of Ireland since 1782 under a
Constitution which, in the Union debates of 1800, he afterwards covered
with deserved ridicule as having led to anarchy, destitution, and
bankruptcy, must be attributed to the exigencies of debate; for he was
an advocate as well as a statesman, and occasionally gave way to the
temptation of making showy but unsubstantial points.

These slips were rare, and do not detract from the massive coherence of
his doctrine. He remains the frankest, the most vivid, and the most
powerful exponent of a theory of government which has waged eternal
conflict with its polar rival, the Liberal theory, in the evolution of
the Empire. The theory, of course, extends much farther than the
bi-racial Irish case, to which Fitzgibbon applied it. It was used, as we
shall see, to meet the bi-racial circumstances of Canada and South
Africa, and it was also used in a modified form to meet the uni-racial
circumstances of Australia and of Great Britain itself. Anyone who reads
the debates on the Reform Bill of 1831 will notice that the opposition
rested at bottom on a profoundly pessimistic distrust of the people, and
on the alleged necessity of an oligarchy vested with the power and duty