ration, and might have been seen up
to the year 1863, a white-headed, white-bearded veteran, sunning
himself in the gardens of the Tuileries. Father Murphy, however, was
not able long to hold out. The want of weapons, the want of money and
of all other resources, and no doubt the want of military experience,
put him and his men at a hopeless disadvantage, and he was defeated in
the end, and was executed in the early summer of 1798.

While the rebellion lasted there were, no doubt, many excesses on both
sides. The rebels sometimes could not be prevented by their leaders
from fearful retaliations on those at whose hands they had seen their
kindred suffer. The gallant Miles Byrne himself has told us in his
memoirs {322} how in certain instances he found it impossible to check
the rage of his followers until their fury had found some satisfaction
in what they believed to be the wild justice of revenge. No one,
however, who has studied the history of the times even as it is told by
loyalist narrators will feel surprised that the policy which had forced
on the outbreak of the rebellion should have driven the rebels into
retaliation on the few occasions when they had the upper hand and found
their enemies at their mercy. It has never been denied that the
excesses committed by the rebels were but the spasmodic outbreaks of
the passion of retaliation, and that the Irish leaders everywhere did
all they could to keep their followers within the bounds of legitimate
warfare. It is not necessary to follow out in detail the story of the
rebellion. With no material help from abroad there could have been but
one end to it, and the end soon came. A peasantry armed with pikes
could hardly hold their own for very long even against the militia
imported from Great Britain, the Orange yeomanry, and the Hessian
troops hired from Germany, to say nothing of the regular English
soldiers, who were armed and trained to war. Even the militiamen and
the yeomanry had better weapons than the pikemen who followed their
Irish leaders to the death. Before the rebellion was wholly crushed
Lord Edward Fitzgerald was dead. The plans arranged by the leaders of
the movement had appointed a certain day for the rising to begin; the
outbreak in Wexford, as has already been shown, was entirely
unpremeditated, and merely forced on by events; and, as might have been
expected, the plans were betrayed to the authorities of Dublin Castle.
Some of the leader