chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration
was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and
complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference
of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund
Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.
In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules
Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own
death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially
independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters
of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a
word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland
has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a
Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have
been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood
in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it
furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than
anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a
thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between
Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a
negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for
believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them
for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social
ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it.
Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish
Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been
satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded.
Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an
illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an
almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an
opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his
conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of
his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a
firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a
Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect.
For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he
felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more
durable