ion and
mischief. To expect that the members could pronounce on no new question
without a fresh reference to their constituents, would be to reduce them
from the position of representatives to that of delegates; such as that
of the members of the old States-general, in France, whose early decay
is attributed by the ablest political writers in no small degree to the
dependence of the members on their constituents for precise
instructions. Another argument on which Mr. Grey insisted with great
earnestness is worth preserving, though subsequent inventions have
destroyed its force; he contended that the example of the Scotch Union
did not, when properly considered, afford any argument in favor of an
Irish Union, from the difference of situation of the two countries.
Scotland was a part of the same island as England; "there was no
physical impediment to rapid and constant communication; the relative
situation of the two countries was such that the King himself could
administer the executive government in both, and there was no occasion
for a separate establishment being kept up in each." But the sea lay
between England and Ireland, and the delays and sometimes difficulties
which were thus interposed rendered it "necessary that Ireland should
have a separate government;" and he affirmed that "this was an
insuperable bar to a beneficial Union," quoting a saying of Lord Somers,
that "if it were necessary to preserve a separate executive government
at Edinburgh after the Union, he would abandon the measure." Mr. Grey
even denied that the prosperity of Scotland since the Union was mainly
attributable to that measure. "It was not the Union; it was the adoption
of a liberal policy, the application of a proper remedy to the
particular evils under which the country labored, that removed the
causes which had impeded the prosperity of Scotland." But this argument
was clearly open to the reply that the adoption of that liberal policy
had been a direct effect of the Union, and would have been impracticable
without it, and was, therefore, a strong inducement to the adoption of a
similar Union with Ireland, where the existing evils were at least as
great as those which, a century before, had kept down Scotland. Another
of his arguments has been remarkably falsified by the event. With a
boldness in putting forward what was manifestly, indeed avowedly, a
party objection, and which, as such, must be looked upon as somewhat
singular, he found a