pes of Irish independence were buried even in the
graves of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone. He had no trust
whatever in any assistance to be given from France, but he set himself
to organize a movement which should be Irish only and should find its
whole organization and its battle-field on the soil of Ireland. He
found numbers of brave and ardent young men to assist him, and he
planned out another rising, which was to begin with a seizure of Dublin
Castle and a holding of the capital as a centre and a citadel of the
new movement for Irish independence. Emmet's passion for national
independence had been strengthened by the passing of the Act of Union.
The Act of Union had long been a project in the mind of Pitt, and
indeed it was the opinion of many observers then, and of some
historical students from that time to the present, that Pitt had forced
on the Irish rebellion in order to give an excuse for the absolute
extinction of the Irish Parliament and the centralization of the system
of government in the Parliament sitting at Westminster. It is, at all
events, quite certain that Pitt accomplished his scheme for a
legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland by a wholesale
system of bribery, the bribery taking the form of peerages, of
high-salaried appointments, of liberal pensions, and even of sums of
ready money. All that was really national in the Irish Parliament
fought to the last against Pitt's Act of Union, but the Act was
carried, and it came into operation on January 1, 1801. The Act itself
and the methods by which {328} it was passed only gave to Robert Emmet
a fresh stimulus to prepare his plans for the independence of Ireland.
We need not follow in detail the story of these plans and the attempt
to put them into execution. Robert Emmet's projects were, no doubt,
all well known to the authorities of Dublin Castle before any attempt
could be made to carry them out. In any case their chances of success
seem to have depended very much upon the simultaneous action of a great
number of persons in a great number of different places, and the
history of every secret revolutionary movement tells us of the almost
insuperable difficulty there is in getting all the actors of such a
drama to appear upon the stage at the same moment and at the right
moment. Emmet's plan broke down, and it ended not even in a general
rising of the nationalists of Dublin, but in a mere street riot, the
most sad and shock