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 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