While diplomacy sought to work its ends in one quarter, brute force laboured in another to disable the arm which had been upraised. The Sheriff of the County Dublin having convened his bailiwick to meet on the subject of Reform, Fitzgibbon, then Attorney-General, addressed an unconstitutional letter to him threatening to proceed by attachment against those who responded to his call. The sheriff himself was fined and imprisoned. The subsidised journalist, Francis Higgins, writes on December 24, 1784:-- The Roman Catholics may evidently see how wickedly intent on their ruin certain people have been, with a serious idea of extending the elective franchise, or, indeed, any other privilege to them. They endeavoured to cajole (the Roman Catholics) into a commotion.[587] In conclusion, the old charge of venality and perfidy is brought against the incorruptible Tandy. 'Napper,' we are told, 'betrayed them.' But Barrington, and all other historians, admit that Tandy was sound to the core. Grattan, in the Life of his father, notices as strange that the Bishop of Derry, who the previous year was so active at the Convention, absented himself from the Congress. The explanation probably is that his lordship had heard something of the detectives with a warrant for his arrest in their pocket. How the Congress crumbled, and the organisation melted away, a glimpse is obtained from Plowden, who embodied in his 'Historical Review' a mass of notes made by O'Leary. 'It is well posterity should know,' writes his biographer, 'how much Plowden was indebted to his co-operation.'[588] Plowden had never been to Ireland until about the year 1800. The following words seem those of a man who knew the inner workings of the governmental policy in 1784. The link of unanimity having been once severed [we read in Plowden], the fall of the armed associations into difference and contention was much more rapid than had been their progress to union. The divisions of the volunteers were encouraged by Government; and for that purpose discord and turbulence were rather countenanced than checked in many counties, particularly upon the delicate and important expedient of admitting the Catholics to the elective franchise, a question which it was artfully attempted to connect with the now declining cause of Parliamentary Reform. Through a long series of years Government had never wanted force to quell internal commotions; and it seemed to be now dreaded lest an union of Irishmen should extinguish the old means of creating dissension. The desire of disuniting the volunteers begat inattention to the grievances of the discontented and distressed peasantry of the South: that wretched and lawless rabble once more assumed the style of _White Boys_,[589] and for some time committed their depredations with impunity, particularly against Kilkenny.[590]