They also put the oppressive
agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county,
merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth.
Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a
certain national modification of the movement. There is something very
typical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without the
guillotine.

Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very
brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the
scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises
since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of
course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the
awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in
Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate
tool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at
all consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and
morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more
spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity.
Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's place,
unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him
in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irish
expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not been
worthy of _their_ immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the
national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by
pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her
poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity.
He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a
partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by
the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality,
but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant's plea. But
not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril,
but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them
that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate
Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the
oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did
not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm
Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in