orders in the Romish Church had been invariably sent to foreign colleges-some to Douai or St. Omer, in France; some to the renowned Spanish University of Salamanca. But the French colleges had been swept away by the Revolution, which also made a passage to Spain (the greater expense of which had at all times confined that resource to a small number of students) more difficult; and the consequence was, that in 1794 the Roman Catholic Primate, Dr. Troy, petitioned the government to grant a royal license for the endowment of a college in Ireland. Justice and policy were equally in favor of the grant of such a request. For the sake of the whole kingdom, and even for that of Protestantism itself, it was better that the Roman Catholic priesthood should be an educated rather than an ignorant body of men; and, in the temper which at that time prevailed over the western countries of the Continent, it was at least equally desirable that the rising generation should be preserved from the contagion of the revolutionary principles which the present rulers of France were so industrious to propagate. Pitt at once embraced the idea, and in the spring of the next year a bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament by the Chief Secretary, authorizing the foundation and endowment of a college at Maynooth, in the neighborhood of Dublin, for the education of Roman Catholics generally, whether destined for the Church or for lay professions. It is a singular circumstance that the only opposition to the measure came from Grattan and his party, who urged that, as the Roman Catholics had recently been allowed to matriculate and take degrees at Trinity College, though not to share in the endowments of that wealthy institution, the endowment of another college, to be exclusively confined to Roman Catholics, would be a retrograde step, undoing the benefits of the recent concession of the authorities of Trinity; would be 'a revival and re-enactment of the principles of separation and exclusion,' and an injury to the whole community. For, as he wisely contended, nothing was so important to the well-doing of the entire people as the extinction of the religious animosities which had hitherto embittered the feelings of each Church toward the other, and nothing could so surely tend to that extinction as the uniting the members of both from their earliest youth, in the pursuit both of knowledge and amusement, as school-fellows and playmates. If Mr. Froude's interpretation of the motives of those who influenced Grattan on this occasion be correct, he was unconsciously made a tool of by those whose real object was a separation from England, of the attainment of which they despaired, unless they could unite Protestants and Roman Catholics in its prosecution. The bill, however, was passed by a very large majority, and L9000 a year was appropriated to the endowment of the college. Half a century afterward, as will be seen, that endowment was enlarged, and placed on a more solid and permanent footing, by one of the ablest of Pitt's successors. It was a wise and just measure; and if its success has not entirely answered the expectations of the minister who granted it, its comparative failure has been owing to circumstances which the acutest judgment could not have foreseen.
But it seems certain that neither the concession nor the refusal of any demands put forward by any party in Ireland could have prevented the insurrection which broke out shortly afterward. There were two parties among the disaffected Irish-or it should, perhaps, rather be said that two different objects were kept in view by them-one of which, the establishment of a republic, was dearer to one section of the malcontents; separation from England, with the contingency of annexation to France, was the more immediate aim of the other, though the present existence of a republican form of government in France to a great extent united the two. As has been mentioned before, the original movers in the conspiracy were of low extraction, Dublin tradesmen in a small way of business. Napper Tandy was an ironmonger, Wolfe Tone was the son of a coach-maker. But they had obtained a recruit of a very different class, a younger son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth, one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the title of 'Citizen Fitzgerald.' He had enrolled himself in a society known as the United Irishmen, and had gone to France, as its plenipotentiary, to arrange with Hoche, one of the most brilliant and popular of the French generals, a scheme for the invasion of Ireland, in which he promised him that, on his landing, he should be joined by tens of thousands of armed Irishmen. Hoche entered warmly into the plan, was furnished with a splendid army by the Directors, and in December, 1796, set sail for Ireland; but the fleet which carried him was dispersed in a storm; many of the ships were wrecked, others were captured by the British cruisers, and the remnant of the fleet, sadly crippled, was glad to regain its harbors. Two years afterward another invading expedition had still worse fortune. General Humbert, who in 1796 had been one of Hoche's officers, did succeed in effecting a landing at Killala Bay, in Mayo; but he and the whole of his force was speedily surrounded, and compelled to surrender; and a month afterward a large squadron, with a more powerful division of troops, under General Hardy, on board, found itself unable to effect a landing, but fell in with a squadron under Sir John Warren, who captured every ship but two; Wolfe Tone, who was on board one of them, being taken prisoner, and only escaping the gallows by suicide.
This happened in October, 1798. But it is difficult to conceive with what object these last expeditions had been despatched from France at all; for in the preceding summer the rebellion of the Irish had broken out, and had been totally crushed in a few weeks;[136] not without terrible loss of life on both sides, nor without the insurgent leaders-though many of them were gentlemen of good birth, fortune, and education, and still more were clergy- showing a ferocity and ingenuity in cruelty which the worst of the French Jacobins had scarcely exceeded; one of the saddest circumstances of the whole rebellion being, that the insurgents, who had burnt men, women, and children alive, who had deliberately hacked others to pieces against whom they did not profess to have a single ground of complaint beyond the fact that they were English and Protestant, found advocates in both Houses of the English Parliament, who declared that the rebellion was owing to the severity of the Irish Viceroy and his chief councillors, who denied that the rebels had solicited French aid, and who even voted against granting to the government the re-enforcements necessary to prevent a revival of the treason.
The rebellion was crushed with such celerity as might have convinced the most disaffected of the insanity of defying the power of Great Britain; but it was certain that the spirit which prompted the rebellion was not extinguished, and that, as it had been fed before, so it would continue to be fed by the factious spirit of members of the Irish House of Commons, and of those who could return members,[137] so long as Ireland had a separate Parliament. Not, indeed, that Pitt required the argument in favor of a Union which was thus furnished. The course adopted by the Irish Parliament on the Regency question was quite sufficient to show how great a mistake had been made by the repeal of Poynings' Act. But what the rebellion proved was, that the Union would not admit of an instant's delay; and Pitt at once applied himself to the task of framing a measure which, while it should strengthen England, by the removal of the necessity for a constant watchfulness over every transaction and movement in Ireland, should at the same time confer on and secure to Ireland substantial advantages, such as, without a Union, the English Parliament could scarcely be induced to contemplate.
Mr. Hallam, in one of the last chapters of his work,[138] while showing by unanswerable arguments the advantages which Scotland has derived from her Union with England, has also enumerated some of the causes which impeded the minister of the day in his endeavors to render it acceptable to the Scotch members to whom it was proposed. The most apparently substantial of these was the unprecedented character of the measure. No past 'experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser state, at least where the government partook so much of the republican form, in one of superior power and ancient rivalry.' But, in the case of the present measure, what had thus been a difficulty in the Scotch Union might have been expected to be regarded as an argument in its favor, since the keenest patriots among the Scotch had long been convinced that the Union had brought a vast increase of prosperity and importance to their country, and what was now confessed to have proved advantageous to Scotland might naturally be expected to be equally beneficial to Ireland. Another obstacle had been the fear of the danger to which the Presbyterian Church might be 'exposed, when brought thus within the power of a Legislature so frequently influenced by one which held her, not as a sister, but rather a bastard usurper to a sister's inheritance.' But here again experience might give her testimony in favor of an Irish Union, since it was incontestable that those apprehensions-which, no doubt, many earnest Scotchmen had sincerely entertained-had not been realized, but that since the Union the Presbyterian Church had enjoyed as great security, as complete independence, and as absolute an authority over its members as in the preceding century; that the Parliament had never attempted the slightest interference with its exercise of its privileges, and that the Church of England had been equally free from the exhibition of any desire to stimulate the Parliament to such action; while the Roman Catholic Church, which had many more adherents in England than the Presbyterian Church had ever had, was quite powerful enough to exact for itself the maintenance of its rights, and the minister was quite willing to grant equal securities to those which, at the beginning of the century, had been thought sufficient for the Church of Scotland. A third reason which our great historical critic puts forward for the disfavor with which the Union was at the time
