merely a law, it is a principle of law; and no one of the advocates of the Union suggested at the time that Ireland was to be governed upon any principles of law other than those applicable to the several members which constitute Great Britain. Such declarations have indeed been made with a strange audacity, but not until Ireland had been stripped by the Union of the power to show what she thought of them. The question then arises from her point of view, has the Act of Union, has the authority exercised by Great Britain under that Act, ever received such an assent of the community, as is necessary in order to invest it with moral authority? And the purpose of this article, fully and broadly stated, is to try that question, so to speak, in her person, and to endeavour to obtain such a view of it, as we might take if, instead of being Englishmen or Scotchmen, we were Irishmen. It is of no avail to say in answer that the people of Ireland are not a community, but only a portion of the community, and that each portion of a community must of necessity be bound by the sense of the aggregate body. At the utmost, this plea can only shift the question one stage backward. It then comes to stand thus:The people of Ireland were once a community, just as much as the people of England or of Scotland ever were. Their title stood, not only upon the witness of ages, but on the Act of the British Parliament in 1783. How did they cease in law to be a community, and has the law, which ordained that cessation, ever received their sanction? Was the assent given to it by the Irish Parliament a morally valid assent? If it was not, has the subsequent action of the nation been such as to furnish the sanction which was originally wanting? It must have been observed, and will, as we go along, be observed still further, that this notion of Irishmen, so strange and unnatural in English ears, that the rule of England under the Act of Union has had no basis in right, is not the offspring of mere passion or of traditionary prejudice, but is professedly derived from a high constitutional argument which must be seriously tried. The Englishman has thought that Ireland has been all along using or encouraging the use of force against right. The Irishman is not only of an opposite but of a contradictory opinion; using the terms in the same strictness of sense, he converts them, and holds that he uses right against force. That resort to Parliamentary methods, which was studied by O'Connell, was renounced by his immediate successors, and was eventually restored and consolidated by Parnell, is not in the view of the Irishman a pretext to cover his unavowable designs, but an abatement of his historical and constitutional claims. It is, indeed, in his view, a double, not a single abatement. He foregoes his claim for the re-establishment of his imperial independence by the Repeal of the Union; and he renounces his title to the use of any other than Parliamentary methods for obtaining the limited concession of Home Rule, although, if the Act of Union is void of moral authority, he would be justified in employing against it any methods whatever, not in themselves immoral. As to some of the remoter facts, which lie at the basis of the historical argument, there is no dispute. In Ireland, as in England, the motive power of government shifted in the course of time from violence to corruption; but what was occasional in the one was systematic, persistent, and determined in the other. Also, what was indigenous in the one was imported into the other. In the seventeenth century, James I. had prepared the material to work upon by the creation of a multitude of Parliamentary boroughs. After the middle of the eighteenth, when Ireland began to show signs of political and national life, the governing power began to defile that life at its source by the constant infusion of poison into the Parliamentary system. Rarely indeed did the Executive, representing England, propose anything that was good to the Parliament; and there is no instance, I believe, in which such a proposal was refused. This weak body was flattered and indulged in all its vices; in its tyranny, selfishness, and bigotry; it was with an equal consistency thwarted in its redeeming efforts on behalf of patriotism and of national freedom. The parts of the pander, the jobber, and the swindler were the parts habitually played by this great and strong country towards that smaller and weaker one. It is an odious task to record these abominations; but recorded they must be until they have been confessed, repented, and repaired; and one who like myself has earned credit with the world by endeavouring to expose foreign tyranny must not shrink from the same task because the crime has been committed within his own borders; especially when it is borne in mind that, at the period we are now approaching, the method of government was not only as arbitrary and lawless as that of Naples in 1849, but was far more sanguinary and savage. Between 1762 and 1783, seventy-three Peerages were created. The House of Commons was so manipulated that, of its 300 members, 213 were appointed by 105 patrons; and the small boroughs were 200 in number. Between 1770 and 1790 alone, forty new or revived places of emolument were created for members of Parliament; and finally, to carry the Union, before the commencement of 1800, twenty-seven3 members of the House, opposed to the Act, were negotiated into retirement, and their places filled by a like number of obedient supporters, who converted a minority into a majority. But this is anticipating. 2 As to the general character of English government in Ireland, Mr. Lecky is, I suppose, an unsuspected witness. What does he say? 2 For the foregoing see Lecky's History of England, vi. 323, 429. * See the names in Grattan's Life and Times, v. 591. Such is the past of English government of Ireland: a tissue of brutality and hypocrisy scarcely surpassed in history. I suppose that, if there has been any one man who more than another could write deliberately and in cool blood on the facts of human experience, it was Benjamin Franklin. What says he of British performances of the eighteenth century in Ireland? Does he find them mildly flecked with spots of what was unhappy and regrettable? It seems that he called them 5 such a combination of rapine, treachery and violence, as would have disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world. This it must be remembered was not the climax ultimately supplied before the Union. It was the high table-land of habitual iniquity, from which another and a portentous ascent had yet to be made, to place it inter apices in the frightful elevation which it reached before and for the purposes of the Act. It is now necessary to sketch the manner in which this miserable aggravation of iniquity was brought about. The views of Mr. Pitt for Ireland, as they were expressed in the year 1784 by his correspondence with the Duke of Rutland, then Viceroy, were everything that equity and patriotism could suggest. He endeavoured to give initial effect to them by his Commercial Propositions, which were accepted by the Irish Parliament. But when, to meet the selfish demands of the British manufacturers, they had been remodelled and transformed, Ireland refused them; and this disappointment, really due either to the Minister himself or to the English manufacturers, seems to have been recorded as an offence against the Irish Parliament. A second occasion of the same kind arrived on the question of the Regency. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox severally asserted extreme doctrines as to the assumption or the grant of this great office. The Irish Parliament pursued an intermediate, and what seems a highly constitutional, course. They assumed the initiative by Address to the Prince of Wales, and prayed him to take upon himself the charge. But Mr. Pitt had triumphed in England; and there was again recorded against the Irish Parliament the want of a sufficiently conforming spirit. And now the French Revolution and its various phases began to act, and to act in opposing directions, both upon the mind of the British Government with respect to Ireland, and upon the temper of Irish parties. On the one hand, it supplied motives of apprehension, which disposed the Ministry to conciliate. On the other hand, by fostering a republican sentiment in the North, by parading the spectre of anti-religious innovation, and by wakening anew the national antipathy against France, it supplied ready means to terrify, to divide, and to coerce. The first effect of this group of 'Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion (first edition), 299. complex influences seems to have been favourable. In 1793 the Roman Catholic population were enfranchised; and the great twin question of Reform broke ground by the appointment of a Committee to consider the state of the representation. We have here the first conclusive proof how thoroughly, apart from the jobbing oligarchs of the ascendency, the spirit of union possessed the body of the people. But unhappily harmony in Ireland, first exhibited on the famous occasion of the Drapier's Letters, was, from the time of Primate Boulter onwards, an object of alarm and aversion to the governing power. Union within Ireland was regarded as danger and menace to England. And before the session of 1793 expired, the spirit of reaction had made itself manifest in the Gunpowder Act and the Convention Act.6 Another and more decisive oscillation of the pendulum came in 1794-5. The war-Whigs, much to their honour, demanded and obtained from Mr. Pitt the mission of Lord Fitzwilliam. His appointment seemed to open for Ireland the gates of Paradise. In the view and sense of the Irish people, North and South, it promised the attainment of both religious and civil liberty: of the first by the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament; of the second by the certain consequence, a real Parliamentary Reform. Such a reform would have purged out the mass of corruption which English agency had persistently infused into the Irish Parliament, and which the patriotism of a minority, when England encouraged it, was but just strong enough to neutralise. Persons may differ on some of the points touching the mission of Fitzwilliam. But there is one point on which they ought not to differ. It wound up Irish expectations to a point, from which they could not be let down without a deadly shock. Numerosa parabat Excelsa turris tabulata, unde altior esset Casus, et impulsæ præceps immane ruinæ. It was the parting of the ways, the drawing of the lots, the raising of the final issue, the crisis of life and death. Under Lord Fitzwilliam there was peace in Ireland with a force of 5,000 men. To pass the Union, after rebellion and massacre had wholly ceased, a force was required, which Lord Castlereagh, in the budget of February 1800, placed at 138,000 men. This enormous army was required to carry a measure odious to the population. The day Lord Fitzwilliam arrived, peace was proclaimed throughout all Ireland. The day he quitted it, she prepared for insurrection. . . . Within three months after, Lord Clare had got the nation into full training for military execution. These are the words of Sir J. Barrington," and they only echo the • Moore, Life of Lord Edw. Fitzgerald, i. 216–20. * Barrington, p. 347; Moore's Lord E. Fitzgerald, i. 260 seqq. known sentiments of Burke. Before this juncture, there was hope and free choice; after it came the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, and a movement as of the swine down the steep, rushing violently into the sea. From this time forward, the policy was at all costs to divide Irishman from Irishman, to revive the dying embers of religious animosity, to corrupt every Irishman that could be bought, to terrify every Irishman that could be terrified, to destroy the reign of law, and establish impunity for the crimes of power, to let loose ferocious assassins upon humble homes, to precipitate rebellion when and where it was preparing, and to create it by intolerable oppression in Wexford where it was not, to establish, in a word, a reign of terror which should make the country uninhabitable. Thus even the Union was to be made desirable; for personal life comes, after all, before public life, and as jewels in a famine are bartered for bread, so it was within the limits of hope that nationality might be sold to buy existence. As one more element of trouble in the caldron of the witches, a flourishing finance was brought into utter confusion; and the Parliament was prevented from passing any measure to obviate pretended difficulties associated with its independence, which were hoarded up as topics to recommend the Union in debate. Finally, all was done that could be done to bury the records of these infamous transactions. Upon the whole it must be owned that the triumph of iniquity was as complete as it was shameful and disastrous. Everything in Ireland was denationalised, except the nation; and eventually, in the North, part even of the nation. During the eighteenth century Ireland cannot be said to have given trouble to England, but only reproach. During the nineteenth, we came gradually to feel, under the Union, that we had a thorn in our side. The pain has grown, and the shame has become more notorious, and the deduction from the due efficiency of our Parliamentary government more grievous, in proportion to the progressive development of our free institutions; until, after ninety years of growing or persisting difficulty, and after signal though intermittent efforts on our part to mitigate and amend many of the worst Irish laws, we find that the inexorable and capital question of British politics is now more than ever the settlement of the Irish question, by the concession of a demand wisely pared down to suit not our necessities only, but even our susceptibilities. As I have already intimated, it is not within the brief limits of an article like this that full proofs can be given of each and all the charges, so heavy as to strain belief, which I have just put together. But, before doing something in the points which are most capital, I will observe that four eminent Englishmen or Scotchmen, at least, have put upon record their impressions on the astonishing events of the five years 1795-1800. Lord Cornwallis, who assumed the Viceroyalty when it was too late to change the guilty policy that he strove so hard to temper, has described some of the very worst of all the facts |