Pitt and Castlereagh, though they plunged their hands deep in the mire to obtain the Union, quite honestly believed in the policy of the Union.  They were wrong.  They merely reestablished the old ascendancy in a form, morally perhaps more defensible, but just as damaging to the interests of Ireland.  In addition to absentee landlords, an alien and a largely absentee Church, there was now an absentee Parliament, remote from all possibility of pressure from Irish public opinion, utterly ignorant of Ireland, containing within it, for twenty-nine years, at any rate, representatives of only one creed, and that the creed of the small minority.  Pitt had virtually pledged himself to make Catholic Emancipation an immediate consequence of the Union, and his Viceroy, Cornwallis, had thereby obtained the invaluable support of the Catholic hierarchy and of many of the Catholic gentry.  The King, half mad at the time, refused to sanction the redemption of the pledge, and Pitt, to his deep dishonour, accepted the insult and dropped the scheme.  Fitzgibbonism in its extreme form had triumphed.  It was a repetition of the perfidy over the Treaty of Limerick a century before.  Indeed, at every turn of Irish history, until quite recent times, there seems to have been perpetrated some superfluity of folly or turpitude which shut the last outlet for natural improvement.  It cannot be held, however, that the refusal of Emancipation for another generation seriously damaged the prospects of the Union as a system of government.  After it was granted, the system worked just as badly as before, and in all essentials continues to work just as badly now.  Inequalities in the Irish franchise were only an aggravation.  In order to cripple Catholic power, Emancipation itself was accompanied in 1829 by an Act which disfranchised at a stroke between seven and eight tenths of the Irish county electorate, nor was it until the latest extension of the United Kingdom franchise, that is, eighty-five years after the Union, that the Irish representation was a true numerical reflection of the Irish democracy.  But these were not vital matters.  In the Home Rule campaigns of 1886 and 1893, Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was impotent.  The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of Irish questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable of comprehending these questions, much less of adjudicating upon them with any semblance 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.