long religious and
constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century, which fell with
terrible severity upon a population which had throughout espoused the
losing cause. Cromwell; realising that "if there is to be a prosperous,
strong and United Kingdom there must be one Parliament and one
Parliament only," freed Ireland from the Colonial status. Unfortunately,
his policy was reversed in 1660, and for over a century Ireland endured
the position of "least favoured Colony"--least favoured, partly because,
with the possible exception of linen, all her industries were
competitive with, and not complementary to English industries, and so
were deliberately crushed in accordance with the common economic policy
of the time, partly because the memories of past struggles kept England
suspicious and jealous of Irish prosperity. Every evil under which the
old colonial system laboured in Canada before the rebellion was
intensified in Ireland by the religious and racial feud between the mass
of the people and the ascendant caste. The same solvent of free
government that Durham recommended was needed by Ireland. In view of the
geographical and economic position of Ireland, and in the political
circumstances of the time, it could only be applied through union with
Great Britain. Union had been vainly prayed for by the Irish Parliament
at the time of the Scottish Union. Most thoughtful students, not least
among them Adam Smith,[56] had seen in it the only cure for the evils
which afflicted the hapless island.

Meanwhile, in 1782, the dominant caste utilised the Ulster volunteer
movement to wrest from Great Britain, then in the last throes of the war
against France, Spain, and America, the independence of the Irish
Parliament. Theoretically co-equal with the British Parliament,
Grattan's Parliament was, in practice, kept by bribery in a position
differing very little from that of Canada before the rebellion. Still
the new system in Ireland might, under conditions resembling those of
Canada in 1840, have gradually evolved into a workable scheme of
self-government. But the conditions were too different. A temporary
economic revival, indeed, followed the removal of the crippling
restrictions upon Irish trade. But, politically, the new system began to
break down almost from the start. Its entanglement in English party
politics, which geography made inevitable, lead to deadlocks over trade
and over the regency question, the latter practicall