painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and
very awful door, on a scene which was called Ireland, but which then
might well have been called hell.

Having chosen our part and made war upon the new world, we were soon
made to understand what such spiritual infanticide involved; and were
committed to a kind of Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the young
world was represented by young men, who shared the democratic dream of
the Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot of Pitt; who was
working a huge machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland
into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England. There was present every
coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere
abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-conscious figure of Pitt has
remained standing incongruously purse in hand; while his manlier rivals
were stretching out their hands for the sword, the only possible resort
of men who cannot be bought and refuse to be sold. A rebellion broke out
and was repressed; and the government that repressed it was ten times
more lawless than the rebellion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a
situation in plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy of
appalling platitudes. The heroes were really heroes; and the villains
were nothing but villains. The common tangle of life, in which good men
do evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident, seemed suspended for
us as for a judgment. We had to do things that not only were vile, but
felt vile. We had to destroy men who not only were noble, but looked
noble. They were men like Wolfe Tone, a statesman in the grand style who
was not suffered to found a state; and Robert Emmet, lover of his land
and of a woman, in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle
grace of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than the young Napoleon;
for he has remained young. He was hanged; not before he had uttered one
of those phrases that are the hinges of history. He made an epitaph of
the refusal of an epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his tomb in
heaven like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen we could only
produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to
have been made famous solely that they might be infamous. He sold his
own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and
has saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed
metaphor called the Union. Here there is no poss