of impartiality.

The Legislative Union was unnatural. The two islands, near as they were
to each other, were on different planes of civilization, wealth, and
economic development, without a common tradition, a common literature,
or a common religion. Each had a temperament and genius of its own, and
each needed a different channel of expression. Laws applicable to one
island were meaningless or noxious in the other; taxation applicable to
a rich industrial island was inappropriate and oppressive for a poor
agricultural island. And upon a system comprising all these
incompatibilities there was grafted the ruinous principle of ascendancy.

There is nothing inherently strange about the difference between England
and Ireland. Artificial land-frontiers often denote much sharper
cleavages of sentiment, character, physique, language, history. A
sea-frontier sometimes makes a less, sometimes a more, effective line of
delimitation. Denmark and Sweden, France and England, are examples.
Nor, on the other hand, did the profound differences between Ireland and
England preclude the possibility of their incorporation in a political
system under one Crown. We know, by a mass of experience from Federal
and other systems, that elements the most diverse in language, religion,
wealth, and tradition may be welded together for common action, provided
that the union be voluntary and the freedom of the separate parts be
preserved. The first conditions of a true union were lacking in the case
of Ireland. The arrangement was not voluntary. It was accompanied by
gross breach of faith, and it signified enslavement, not liberty.

A true Union was not even attempted. The Government of Ireland, in
effect, and for the most part in form, was still that of a conquered
Colonial Dependency. It was no more representative in any practical
sense after the Union than before the Union. The popular vote was
submerged in a hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded
rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own degradation,
the Union having been purchased with titles, and titles having been for
a century past the price paid for the servility of Anglo-Irish
statesmen. But the peerage, in the persons of the twenty-eight
representatives sent to Westminster, still remained a powerful nucleus
of anti-Irish opinion, infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish
prejudice, and often opposing a last barrier to reform when the
opposition of