sting, it may well be,
for twenty years or more, to enforce throughout every part of the United
Kingdom obedience to the law of the land. This effort can only be
justified by the equally strenuous determination (which must involve an
infinity of trouble) to give ear to every Irish complaint, and to see
that the laws which the Irish people obey are laws of justice, and (what
is much the same thing) laws which in the long run the people of Ireland
will feel to be just. To carry out this course of action is difficult
for all governments, is perhaps specially difficult for a democratic
government. To maintain the Union is no easy task, though it has yet to
be proved that any form of Home Rule will give more ease to the people
of England; nor can the difficulty be got rid of, though it may be
somewhat changed, by abolishing the Irish representation in Parliament,
or by treating Ireland as a Crown colony. Such steps, which could hardly
be termed maintenance of the Union, might, as expedients for carrying
through safely a course of reform, be morally and for a time
justifiable. Their adoption is, however, liable to an almost insuperable
objection. Democracy in Great Britain does not comport with official
autocracy in Ireland. Every government must be true to its principles,
and a democracy which played the benevolent despot would suffer
demoralisation.

[Sidenote: Good results of the Union.]

The Act of Union has been the aim of so much random invective that its
good fruits (for it has borne good no less than evil fruits) are in
danger of being forgotten. It ended once and for all an intolerable
condition of affairs, and its scope will never be understood unless its
enactments are read in the lurid light cast upon them by the rebellion
of 1798. The hateful means used to obtain an apparently good end have
cast a slur on the reputation of more than one high-toned statesman.
Humanity, in the case of Cornwallis at least, had far more share than
ambition in his determination to abolish the Irish Parliament. His
anxiety in 1798 to save Catholics and rebels from oppression was as keen
and as noble as the anxiety of Canning in 1858 to protect the natives of
India from the resentments excited by the Mutiny. Every reason which in
our own day after the Gordon riots made it necessary to abolish the
ancient constitution of Jamaica told in 1800 in favour of abolishing the
still more ancient Parliament of Ireland. If statesmen, bent on
res