of the House in a great parliamentary age. We heard again
the Virgilian hexameters in which Pitt had described the spirit of his
policy at the union:--

"Paribus se legibus ambae
Invictae gentes aeterna in foedera mittant."

We heard once more how Grattan said that union of the legislatures was
severance of the nations; that the ocean forbade union, the channel
forbade separation; that England in her government of Ireland had gone to
hell for her principles and to bedlam for her discretion. There was, above
all, a grand and copious anthology throughout the debate from Burke, the
greatest of Irishmen and the largest master of civil wisdom in our tongue.

The appearance of a certain measure of the common form of all debates was
inevitable. No bill is ever brought in of which its opponents do not say
that it either goes too far, or else it does not go far enough; no bill of
which its defenders do not say as to some crucial flaw pounced upon and
paraded by the enemy, that after all it is a mere question of drafting, or
can be more appropriately discussed in committee. There was the usual
evasion of the strong points of the adversary's case, the usual
exaggeration of its weak ones. That is debating. Perorations ran in a
monotonous mould; integrity of the empire on one side, a real, happy, and
indissoluble reconciliation between English and Irish on the other.

One side dwelt much on the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795, and the
squalid corruption of the union; the other, on the hopeless distraction
left by the rebellion of 1798, and the impotent confusion of the Irish
parliament. One speaker enumerated Mr. Pitt's arguments for the union--the
argument about the regency and about the commercial treaty, the argument
about foreign alliances and confederacies and the army, about free trade
and catholic emancipation; he showed that under all these six heads the
new bill carefully respected and guarded the grounds taken by the minister
of the union. He was bluntly answered by the exclamation that nobody cared
a straw about what Mr. Pitt said, or what Sir Ralph Abercromby said; what
we had to deal with were the facts of the case in the year 1886. You show
your mistrust of the Irish by inserting all these safeguards in the bill,
said the opposition. No, replied ministers; the safeguards are to meet no
mistrusts of ours, but those entertained or feigned by other people. You
had no mandate for home rule, said