lly
irresolute man is capable of clinging to a policy or a conviction, to
which he has once been driven by dire stress of circumstance. Windham
having at last made up his mind to be frightened by the Revolution,
was more violently and inconsolably frightened than anybody else.

Pitt, after he had been forced into war, at least intended it to be
a war on the good old-fashioned principles of seizing the enemy's
colonies and keeping them. He was taunted by the alarmists with caring
only for sugar islands, and making himself master of all the islands
in the world except Great Britain and Ireland. To Burke all this was
an abomination, and Windham followed Burke to the letter. He even
declared the holy rage of the _Third Letter on a Regicide Peace_,
published after Burke's death, to contain the purest wisdom and the
most unanswerable policy. It was through Windham's eloquence and
perseverance that the monstrous idea of a crusade, and all Burke's
other violent and excited precepts, gained an effective place and
hearing in the cabinet, in the royal closet, and in the House of
Commons, long after Burke himself had left the scene.

We have already seen how important an element Irish affairs became in
the war with America. The same spirit which had been stirred by
the American war was inevitably kindled in Ireland by the French
Revolution. The association of United Irishmen now came into
existence, with aims avowedly revolutionary. They joined the party
which was striving for the relief of the Catholics from certain
disabilities, and for their admission to the franchise. Burke had
watched all movements in his native country, from the Whiteboy
insurrection of 1761 downwards, with steady vigilance, and he watched
the new movement of 1792 with the keenest eyes. It made him profoundly
uneasy. He could not endure the thought of ever so momentary and
indirect an association with a revolutionary party, either in Ireland
or any other quarter of the globe, yet he was eager for a policy which
should reconcile the Irish. He was so for two reasons. One of them was
his political sense of the inexpediency of proscribing men by whole
nations, and excluding from the franchise on the ground of religion a
people as numerous as the subjects of the King of Denmark or the King
of Sardinia, equal to the population of the United Netherlands, and
larger than were to be found in all the states of Switzerland. His
second reason was his sense of the urgen