the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome.
In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were obtained,
not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence in Ireland itself.
There was still a separate Executive in Ireland, a separate system of
local administration, and until 1817 a separate financial system, all of
them wholly outside Irish control. The only change of constitutional
importance was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his
autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown Colony,
were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a member of the British
Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of Government increased, there grew
up that grotesque system of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at
the present day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole
patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in English
hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways frankly corrupt, it was
manipulated in a fashion just as deleterious to Ireland. Before, as
after, the Union there was no public career in Ireland for an Irishman
who was in sympathy with the great majority of his countrymen. To win
the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it
was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time
all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly,
by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing
supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish
public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was
preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used
for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained
attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. Locker-Lampson
puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument
of her humiliation. The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as
before, it was the principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons
multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest
Irish lawyers were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their
own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of combating
legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of framing and carrying
into execution laws which increased the maladies they were intended to
allay.

Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland. In man