stly 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