Union period was to prepare the necessary mechanism and atmosphere for the open revolution. The faint assistance given by the revolutionary French and the slackness of the Republican Directory of France can only be explained on one assumption. The hidden leaders of the revolution were not prepared to support a country which was still predominantly Catholic in religion and whose democracy was essentially superstitious and reactionary peasantry. The seeds of republicanism and the tenets of subversive revolution were, however, sown and have never been eradicated, nor have they yet come to their full harvest.

CHAPTER III

RIBBON MEN AND OTHERS

THE result of the insurrection of 1798 and of the bloody horrors of its suppression was that the different elements of insurgency were clearly defined. On the one hand, we find the Catholic people and bourgeoisie linked in alliance with the Jacobin minority among the Protestants, on the other side there are arrayed the governing classes and the loyal Protestant settlers. The secret organisation of United Irishmen stood for the subversive elements, while the Orange secret society stood for uncompromising support of the Crown and Constitution and Protestant principles.

The rebellion had led to the destruction of the United Irishmen as an active association, but it was not killed-only scotched, and Emmett had had no trouble in finding secret devotees to help him in his futile rising, thereby showing that the virus still existed. Thus, despite the failure of the French Revolution of the Jacobin period, the collapse of the Directorate and the rise of the Consulate of Napoleon, there were many who still clung to the dangerous doctrines of the Revolution.

It is worth considering the abstract influence of Jacobin thought fairly closely, for it is only by appreciating the psychology of revolutionists that

we can analyse the conflicting elements of the Irish insurgency of the time. The Jacobins-like their descendants, the Bolsheviki-were out to produce a total upheaval of established society, not only in France but wide-world in its distribution. The revolution in France was aided, if not brought about, by Orleanist and Prussian influence, for there were many interests converging insensibly towards the same end which were exploited by the engineers of the Revolution.

In these days it is difficult to think of any leader of the Revolution as being moved by impersonal, detached motives. People have sought to find in all those personalities the dominant motive of calculated logical self-interest; it was present in perhaps the majority, but the dreadful and powerful organising minority of intellectuals were fanatics, and to them the "secret principles of revolution" were in very fact a religion.

The fanaticism of religion is seen at its best when crowds are the subject of its swift intoxication. The frenzy of Welsh revivalists, the astounding

Gospel meetings" of the American negroes, are commonplace modern instances of emotional crowd psychology. In the early days of the Russian Revolution, sane and cynical observers were sent by Fleet Street to report on the situation in Russia. It was remarked that those men rapidly became infected with the doctrine and returned unbalanced-unable to explain what it was that appealed to them. They were inarticulate, unable to reconcile revolution with commonsense, yet impressed with the stupendousness of the topsy-turviness, drawn willy-nilly by the

crazy ideals, transcendentally stirred by the immensity of the blood sacrifice. "Bolshevism," they said, was a new thing, a gigantic thing, it was not like a closely-argued political creed-it was religion."

Jacobinism and Bolshevism may differ in some details of policy, but are identical in psychology and basic doctrine. The Jacobin had no more real interest in the people than the Bolshevik leader has in the proletariat; the people who incidentally always suffer most in these upheavals were to be sacrificed heedlessly in order to make the new theories translate into fact. This temporary misery, suffering and death would be but a little thing compared with the wonderful benefits to be conferred on posterity by the revolutionary system-when established.

The great mystery of revolutions is the comparative ease with which a few determined selfseekers and a handful of energetic visionaries can coerce vast masses into a genuine temporary belief in their illusions. The Irish people have always been, and so long as they endure will always be, the prey of agitators. Education is no prophylactic, for the educated Irish are just as easily swept to illogical vehemence by mass hysteria as are the rude peasantry. Thus the Jacobins, though they despised the Irish for their peculiar subjugation to the Catholic priesthood, yet realised that there was no better material for swift conversion to the principles of anarchy, provided that some specious pretext was available.

The cause of religion, the cause of Irish nationality, or any other cause that could be

selected from the endless catalogue of Irish grievances, real or fancied; these were but handles, levers with which to start the snowball of destruction rolling. The ideal to achieve was universal chaos.

Great Britain has always stood out as the natural opponent of fantastic and illogical schemes of revolution. Slow, constitutional, inherently law-abiding, the mentality of the English people is absolutely opposed to revolution, so long as progress can be peacefully effected by constitutional reform. The leaders of the French Revolution knew that so long as Great Britain was not infected with the revolutionary craze, their own movement was doomed to eventual failure and collapse. War with England was, therefore, decreed at the earliest possible moment, and the revolution in Ireland was to be part of the war measures against England. In the general welter of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the fact was largely lost sight of that these wars were only a secondary phenomenon of the Revolution.

The interdependence of "Church and State" was much more than a mere phrase in those times a hundred and fifty years ago. The aggressive policy of the Roman Catholic Church and its natural orientation with the common enemies of England Spain, France and the Stuarts, was a living thing in memory. In Ireland, to the Protestant settlers and the governing classes of the Protestant ascendancy, "Church and State" was the vital backbone to which they clung, and it was early recognised that the subversive doctrines