ible see-saw of
sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell
and Charles I.: there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out
for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even
the incidental resemblances between the two sides only served to sharpen
the contrast and the complete superiority of the nationalists. Thus,
Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were both aristocrats. But
Castlereagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court, Fitzgerald the
generous gentleman upon the land; some portion of whose blood, along
with some portion of his spirit, descended to that great gentleman,
who--in the midst of the emetic immoralism of our modern politics--gave
back that land to the Irish peasantry. Thus again, all such
eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost anywhere) stood
apart from the popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they were
theoretically Protestants, but practically pagans. But Tone was the type
of pagan who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt was the type of
pagan who consents to persecute; and his place is with Pilate. He was an
intolerant indifferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but more
ready to massacre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans, Tone and
Castlereagh, found a pagan end in suicide. But the circumstances were
such that any man, of any party, felt that Tone had died like Cato and
Castlereagh had died like Judas.

The march of Pitt's policy went on; and the chasm between light and
darkness deepened. Order was restored; and wherever order spread, there
spread an anarchy more awful than the sun has ever looked on. Torture
came out of the crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sunlight of
the streets and fields. A village vicar was slain with inconceivable
stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted
priest. Rape became a mode of government. The violation of virgins
became a standing order of police. Stamped still with the same terrible
symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers
seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and
daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of
a religion which makes of innocence the Mother of God. In its bodily
aspects it became like a war of devils upon angels; as if England could
produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs. Such
was a part of the price paid by