Fitzwilliam, the one Viceroy in the eighteenth century who ever conceived the idea of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, came over from England with the avowed intention of proposing it, is a matter of conjecture. Fitzwilliam was snuffed out by Pitt, and recalled under circumstances which still remain a matter of controversy. All we can say with certainty is that the opinion of Ireland at large was absolutely ignored, and that English party intrigues and English claims on Irish patronage had much to do with the result. On the whole, however, I agree with Mr. Fisher that too much importance has been given to this episode, especially by Mr. Lecky, who devotes nearly a volume to it. The anti-national Irish Parliament was past praying for. Long before 1795 the Irish aristocracy had lost whatever power for good it ever possessed, and most of the resolute reformers of Wolfe Tone's middle-class Protestant school had turned, under the enthralling fascination of the French Revolution, into revolutionaries. Reform had been refused in 1782; again, and without coercion from the Volunteers, in 1783. It was refused again in 1784, against the advice of Pitt and at the instigation of Pitt's own Viceroy, Rutland, whom Pitt had urged--what a grim irony it seems!--to give "unanswerable proofs that the cases of Ireland and England are different," and who answered with truth that the ascendancy of a minority could only be maintained "by force or corruption." Every succeeding year showed the same results. Wolfe Tone was more than justified, he was compelled, to convert his Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791, into a revolutionary organization and to seek by forcible means to overthrow the Executive which controlled Parliament and, through it, Ireland. Since the symbol of the Irish Executive was the British Crown, he, of course, abjured the Crown, though he had no more quarrel with the Crown as such than had the American or Canadian patriots. He simply loved his country, and from the first saw with clear eyes the only way to save her. Tolerance to him was not an isolated virtue, but an integral part of democracy. He took little interest in the Parliamentary side of Catholic relief, realizing its hollow unreality, and, in the case of the Bill of 1793, actually ridiculing the absurd spectacle of the Catholic cottiers being herded to the poll by their Protestant landlords. Nor was he even an extreme Democrat, for he advocated a ten-pound, instead of a forty shilling franchise. His original pamphlet of 1791 contains nothing but the most sober political common sense.