The Legislative Union is not a landmark or a turning-point in Irish history.  It reproduced “under less assailable forms” the Government which existed prior to 1782.  The real crisis, as I have said, came at the end of 1783, when the Volunteers tried, by reforming Parliament, to give Irish Government an Irish character.  It is essential to remember—­now as much as ever before—­that Ireland has never had a national Parliament.  She has never been given a chance of self-expression and self-development.  It is useless, though Home Rulers frequently give way to the temptation, to advocate Home Rule by arguing from Grattan’s Parliament.  O’Connell, in the Repeal debate of 1834, devoted hours to praising that Parliament, and had his own argument turned against him with crushing force by the Secretary to the Treasury, who easily proved that it was the most corrupt and absurd body that ever existed.  The same game of cross-purposes went on in the Home Rule debates of 1886 and 1893, and reappeared but this year in a debate of the House of Lords (July 4, 1911), when the Roman Catholic Home Ruler, Lord MacDonnell, eulogized Grattan’s Parliament in answer to Lord Londonderry, the Protestant Unionist landlord, who painted it in its true colours.  Yet Lord Londonderry springs from the class and school of Charlemont, who, by refusing to act as an Irishman, hastened the ruin of the Parliament which Lord Londonderry satirizes, and Lord MacDonnell from the race which was betrayed by that Parliament.  The anomaly need not surprise us.  It is not stranger than the fact that the Union would never have been carried without Catholic support in Ireland.

The point we have to grasp is that Ireland was a victim to the crudity and falsity of the political ideas current at the time of the Union, persistent all over the Empire for long afterwards, and not extinct yet.  Between Separation, personified by Tone, and Union, personified by Fitzgibbon, and carried by those milder statesmen, Castlereagh and Pitt, there seemed to be no alternative.  Actually there was and is an alternative:  a responsible Irish Parliament and Government united to England by sympathy and interest.

The Parliamentary history of the Union does not much concern us.  Bribery, whether by titles, offices, or cash, had always been the normal means of securing a Government majority in the Irish House of Commons.  Corruption was the only means of carrying the vote for the Union, and the time and labour needed for securing that vote are a measure of the rewards gained by those who formed the majority.  Disgusting business as it was, we have to admit that a Parliament which refused to reform itself at the bidding of all that was best and healthiest in Ireland did, on its own account, deserve extinction.  The sad thing is that the true Ireland was sacrificed.