ne of the saddest circumstances of the whole rebellion being, that the
insurgents, who had burnt men, women, and children alive, who had
deliberately hacked others to pieces against whom they did not profess
to have a single ground of complaint beyond the fact that they were
English and Protestant, found advocates in both Houses of the English
Parliament, who declared that the rebellion was owing to the severity of
the Irish Viceroy and his chief councillors, who denied that the rebels
had solicited French aid, and who even voted against granting to the
government the re-enforcements necessary to prevent a revival of the
treason.

The rebellion was crushed with such celerity as might have convinced the
most disaffected of the insanity of defying the power of Great Britain;
but it was certain that the spirit which prompted the rebellion was not
extinguished, and that, as it had been fed before, so it would continue
to be fed by the factious spirit of members of the Irish House of
Commons, and of those who could return members,[137] so long as Ireland
had a separate Parliament. Not, indeed, that Pitt required the argument
in favor of a Union which was thus furnished. The course adopted by the
Irish Parliament on the Regency question was quite sufficient to show
how great a mistake had been made by the repeal of Poynings' Act. But
what the rebellion proved was, that the Union would not admit of an
instant's delay; and Pitt at once applied himself to the task of framing
a measure which, while it should strengthen England, by the removal of
the necessity for a constant watchfulness over every transaction and
movement in Ireland, should at the same time confer on and secure to
Ireland substantial advantages, such as, without a Union, the English
Parliament could scarcely be induced to contemplate.

Mr. Hallam, in one of the last chapters of his work,[138] while showing
by unanswerable arguments the advantages which Scotland has derived from
her Union with England, has also enumerated some of the causes which
impeded the minister of the day in his endeavors to render it acceptable
to the Scotch members to whom it was proposed. The most apparently
substantial of these was the unprecedented character of the measure. No
past "experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser
state, at least where the government partook so much of the republican
form, in one of superior power and ancient rivalry." But, in the case