easantry take the field against the British
Government with Beresfords, Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head. If
the Vendeans had risen to drive out the Charettes, the Bonchamps, the
Larochejacquelins, the parallel would have been nearer the mark. The
report of the Devon Commission, the green pamphlet containing an
account of the famous three days' discussion between O'Connell and
Butt in the Dublin Corporation In 1843, or half a dozen of Lord
Clare's speeches between 1793 and 1800, will give a clearer insight
into the Irish problem than a bushel of books about the Vendean or any
other episode of the Revolution.

Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose of practical
enlightenment, to draw parallels between the action of the Catholic
clergy in Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy on the eve of
the Revolution. There is no sort of force in the argument that because
the French clergy fared ill at the Revolution,[1] therefore the Irish
clergy will fare ill when self-government is bestowed on Ireland.
Such talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, without any of the
foundations of a true historical analogy. The differences between the
two cases are obvious, and they go to the heart of the matter. For
instance, the men who came to the top of affairs in France were
saturated both with speculative unbelief for one thing, and with
active hatred of the Church for another. In Ireland, on the contrary,
there is no speculative unbelief, as O'Connell used so constantly to
boast; and the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely national
and popular, has nourished none of those gross and swollen abuses
which provoked the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary France.
In truth, it is with precisely as much or as little reason that most
of the soothsayers and prognosticators of evil take the directly
opposite line. Instead of France these persons choose, as they have an
equally good right to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or
South America. Why not? They assure us, in their jingling phrase, that
Home Rule means Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and
that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry,
superstition, and obscurantism. One of these two mutually destructive
predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no
more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we
attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as
the