y involving the
right to choose a separate sovereign. The same geographical conditions
made it impossible for Ireland to escape the influence of the French
Revolution. The factious spirit and the oppression of the ruling caste
did the rest. There is no need to dwell here on the horrors of the
rising of 1798, and of its repression, or on the political and financial
chaos that marked the collapse of an ill-starred experiment. England,
struggling for her existence, had had enough of French invasion, civil
war, and general anarchy on her flank. The Irish Parliament died, as it
had lived, by corruption, and Castlereagh and Pitt conferred upon
Ireland the too long delayed boon of equal partnership in the United
Kingdom.

The mistakes which, for a century, deprived the Union of much of its
effect--the delay in granting Catholic emancipation, the folly of Free
Trade, acquiesced in by Irish members, by which agrarian strife was
intensified, and through which Ireland again lost the increase of
population which she had gained in the first half century of Union--need
not be discussed here. The fact remains that to-day Ireland is
prosperous, and on the eve of far greater prosperity under a sane
system of national economic policy. What is more, Ireland is in the
enjoyment of practically every liberty and every privilege that is
enjoyed by any other part of the United Kingdom, of greater liberty and
privilege than is enjoyed by Dominions which have no control of Imperial
affairs. The principle which in the case of the Colonies was applied
through separate governments has, in her case, been applied through
Union. It could only have been applied through Union in 1800. It can
only be applied through Union to-day. Railways and steamships have
strengthened the geographical and economic reasons for union;
train-ferries and aircraft will intensify them still further. Meanwhile
the political and strategical conditions of these islands in the near
future are far more likely to resemble those of the great Napoleonic
struggle than those of the Colonial Empire in its halcyon period.

In one aspect, then, the Union was the only feasible way of carrying out
the principle which underlay the successful establishment of Colonial
self-government. In another aspect it was the last step of a natural
and, indeed, inevitable process for which the history of the British
Colonies since the grant of self-government has furnished analogies in
abundance. It h