e aristocracy, an aristocracy not
founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable
distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all
distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices....
Without a union with Great Britain, the inhabitants of Ireland are
not likely, for many ages, to consider themselves as one people."

Pitt, who was proud to proclaim himself the pupil of Adam Smith in
politics and in economics, found himself, a quarter of a century after
these words were written, in a position to carry out, in face of great
difficulties and dangers at home and abroad, the beneficent reform
advocated by his great master--a reform which, as we have seen, could
have been carried a century earlier without any difficulty whatever. But
the century that had been wasted involved many concurrent miseries and
misfortunes: social and economic stagnation, an intensification of
religious and racial bitterness, conspiracy, and invasion; savage
outbreaks savagely repressed. When the time comes to measure up the
rights and wrongs of those dark days, the judgment on England will
assuredly be that her fault was not the carrying of the Union, but the
delaying of that great measure of reform and emancipation until it was
almost too late.

The story of the Union has been told and retold in the utmost detail
throughout the century. The present writer has attempted quite recently
to summarise it,[12] and there is little to add. The charge that it was
carried by corruption is simply another way of saying that it had,
constitutionally, to be passed through the Dublin Parliament, that body
which, from the days of Swift's invective to those of its final
condemnation, lived and moved and had its being solely in and by
corruption. As Lord Castlereagh, who had charge of the Bill in the Irish
House of Commons, put it, the Government was forced to recognise the
situation and its task was "to buy out and secure to the Crown forever
the fee simple of Irish corruption, which has so long enfeebled the
power of Government and endangered the connection."

THE UNION.

The Irish Parliament had run its course, and had involved the unhappy
country in chaos, bankruptcy, revolution, and bloodshed. Lord Clare--a
late and reluctant convert to the policy of the Union--said in the Irish
House of Lords (Feb. 10, 1800)--

"We have not three years of redemption from bankruptcy, intolerable
t