the new system in Ireland might, under conditions resembling those of Canada in 1840, have gradually evolved into a workable scheme of self-government.  But the conditions were too different.  A temporary economic revival, indeed, followed the removal of the crippling restrictions upon Irish trade.  But, politically, the new system began to break down almost from the start.  Its entanglement in English party politics, which geography made inevitable, lead to deadlocks over trade and over the regency question, the latter practically involving the right to choose a separate sovereign.  The same geographical conditions made it impossible for Ireland to escape the influence of the French Revolution.  The factious spirit and the oppression of the ruling caste did the rest.  There is no need to dwell here on the horrors of the rising of 1798, and of its repression, or on the political and financial chaos that marked the collapse of an ill-starred experiment.  England, struggling for her existence, had had enough of French invasion, civil war, and general anarchy on her flank.  The Irish Parliament died, as it had lived, by corruption, and Castlereagh and Pitt conferred upon Ireland the too long delayed boon of equal partnership in the United Kingdom.

The mistakes which, for a century, deprived the Union of much of its effect—­the delay in granting Catholic emancipation, the folly of Free Trade, acquiesced in by Irish members, by which agrarian strife was intensified, and through which Ireland again lost the increase of population which she had gained in the first half century of Union—­need not be discussed here.  The fact remains that to-day Ireland is prosperous, and on the eve of far greater prosperity under a sane system of national economic policy.  What is more, Ireland is in the enjoyment of practically every liberty and every privilege that is enjoyed by any other part of the United Kingdom, of greater liberty and privilege than is enjoyed by Dominions which have no control of Imperial affairs.  The principle which in the case of the Colonies was applied through separate governments has, in her case, been applied through Union.  It could only have been applied through Union in 1800.  It can only be applied through Union to-day.  Railways and steamships have strengthened the geographical and economic reasons for union; train-ferries and aircraft will intensify them still further.  Meanwhile the political and strategical conditions of these islands in the near future are far more likely to resemble those of the great Napoleonic struggle than those of the Colonial Empire in its halcyon period.