The Viceroyalty had lasted six weeks; but Fitzwilliam is remembered while the phantom rulers who preceded and followed him are forgotten. The episode has a narrower and a wider aspect. That his dismissals were in contravention of the understanding on which his appointment rested was admitted by his personal and political friends in the Cabinet. But though the Viceroy was guilty of disloyalty to his instructions, a strong case can be made out for his policy. He knew that the prevailing system was thoroughly vicious, and he realised that if a policy of conciliation and reform was to be undertaken it could not be effectively carried out by men who were opposed to it. As Pitt had explicitly vetoed a change of system, it would have been wiser to have refused the post. The aims of the two men were fundamentally different. Though in favour of admitting Catholics to Parliament, Pitt thought it safer to defer emancipation till a Union was accomplished, and therefore determined to preserve Government patronage and control for future emergencies. Fitzwilliam desired to govern Ireland in accordance with Irish ideas, in the spirit of the Constitution of 1782 and with the help of men who were loyal to it. In his recent work, “The End of the Irish Parliament,” Mr. Fisher, who finds nothing to admire in the Grattan Parliament and little in its founder, suggests that the Fitzwilliam crisis was a storm in a tea-cup, and that the main issue involved was the substitution of the Ponsonbys for the Beresfords as the dispensers of patronage. But Irish tradition is in this case a safe guide as to the character and importance of the incident. Ireland instinctively felt, as India was to feel nearly a century later in regard to Ripon, that Fitzwilliam was a friend. The news of his recall was received with delight in Ascendency circles, and elsewhere with consternation. It was taken as a definite rejection of the Catholic claims, and increasing numbers despaired of achieving any real reform by peaceful means. It revealed in a flash that the autonomy of Ireland was a sham. From this point the rebellion of 1798 and the Union were in sight.