MR. FROUDE'S "ENGLISH IN IRELAND."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPROTATOIC]
SIR,—I thank you for your review of the 18th on "Fronde." I do not think Englishmen are at all aware of the enormous mis- chief done by the Irish rebellion of 1798 and its suppression. Mr. Lecky remarks that the mutual feeling of parties and all political life in Ireland were much worse after the union with Great Britain than before. The fact is truly stated, but I think the cause is wrongly assigned. The mischief was not due to the Union, but to the disappointment, rancour, and hopelessness which the rebel- lion and its suppression left behind them. Previously, Grattan's generous policy was succeeding, and parties were becoming recon- ciled. The first effect of the events of 1798 was to separate parties snore widely than ever, their second effect was to renew the sense of hostility to the British Government, which was credited, perhaps unjustly, with all the cruelties of the so-called loyal party. This latter effect is by no means exhausted yet. Had Ireland been treated then with the same justice and mercy as Canada at the time of its rebellion forty years later, political feeling in Ireland. would now be much better than it is.
At the time of the so-called Fenian rebellion, many persons wished the insurrection to break out in order that it might be crushed. Nothing could be more unwise. Next to a victory,. what would stimulate the rebellious spirit most would be a defeat._
I do not mean such defeats as those of the Fenian rebellions,. which were not really defeated, but prevented. I mean real civil, war, like that of 1798; something to be talked over for forty years, and to interest the next generation. I passed my boyhood among the traditions of 1798—men were then living who remembered, its events—and I know the deadly fascination of such tales, though-
I was not taught to wish, and did not wish, that the rebellionhad succeeded.
Mr. Froude excuses the atrocities of the " loyal " party by saying' that they dreaded massacre. I believe the real dread was not of massacre, but of confiscation. Irish rebels have always looked to a reversal of the confiscations of the seventeenth century, but I do not believe there is any foundation for the belief that there was a plan to massacre the Protestants. Most of the rebel leaders were Protestants, and the Protestant city of Belfast, which now fancies itself Conservative and is Orange, was then a focus of disaffection. Bad as was the state of Ireland in 1798, it was not bad enough to make it possible to repeat the massacres of a hundred and fifty
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