But the greatest of Pitt's domestic difficulties has been left to the last. Throughout the whole period of the war, he had by his side the gaunt spectre of the Irish question in its most menacing and formidable shape; an aspect which it retains to this hour. It has never passed into history, for it has never passed out of politics.

To take a simile from a catastrophe of nature less ruinous and less deplorable, the volcano that caused that eruption is still active; beneath the black crust the lava torrent burns; so that the incautious explorer who ventures near the crater finds the treacherous surface yield, and himself plunged in the fiery marl of contemporary party strife. No number of previous volumes will suffice to ballast or preserve the innocent investigator; his fate is certain and foreseen; for, the moment his foot rests on 1795 he irresistibly slips on to 1886; and rebounding from 1886, he is soon soused in 1891.

Happily, however, it is only necessary, for the present purpose, to consider the actual personal contact of Pitt with Irish affairs, and not to deal with their general phases and effects; although, even thus, there are episodes so controversial that they cannot be treated so concisely as those in regard to which there is less dispute.

It is needful to remember that Pitt, after the rejection of his commercial schemes in 1785, appeared to despair of a change of system. He sent over Viceroys and Chief Secretaries to occupy Dublin Castle and accept its traditions, Buckinghams and Westmorelands, Fitzherberts and Hobarts, but he turned his own attention, perforce, elsewhere.

Then came the Regency question; when the action of the Irish Parliament indicated dangerous possibilities under the settlement of 1782, contingencies, which once more directed men's minds towards a Union, and furnished arguments in its favour not easy to meet in those times of perpetual apprehension and peril.

The next stage in Irish politics is the emancipation of the Roman Catholics in 1792 and 1793; when measures were passed, which, by admitting the Catholic peasantry to the parliamentary suffrage and to juries, and by relieving them from all property disabilities, exhausted, for the time at any rate, their interest in that question. The delay in granting a full emancipation subsequently gave the admission of Catholics to Parliament and to office, no doubt, considerable importance.

But it was accompanied by a reversal of the enfranchisement of 1793, and was therefore so much the less a popular boon than the Acts passed by Pitt. To say that they were passed by Pitt is but the strictest truth; for it was only owing to the persistent pressure of Pitt and Dundas that the violent hostility of the Irish Government was overcome. "I do not believe," writes the Viceroy with plaintive acrimony as regards even the minor measure of 1792, "there was ever an instance in any country of such a sacrifice of private judgment to the wishes of His Majesty" (meaning of course the British Government) "as by the Irish ministers in the present concession."

While this was the act of Pitt and Dundas alone, it may be noted that, after the admission of the Whigs, the official protectors of the Catholics, to the Cabinet in the ensuing year, nothing more was done for their benefit.

It was in July 1794, as has been seen, that the Portland Whigs joined Pitt. The Duke, their leader, in this rearrangement obtained the Home Secretaryship; under which department Ireland was then directly, as it is now more nominally, placed. It was also arranged that, so soon as a new opening could be found for Lord Westmoreland, Fitzwilliarn should succeed him as Viceroy of Ireland. In this way the two official heads of Ireland would be Whig, under of course the general superintendence of the Cabinet; but it was expressly stipulated that there should be no change of system; and that, in fact, Irish policy should be continuous with that previously pursued by the Government.

We are told that Fitzwilliam accepted the Lord Lieutenancy after long hesitation and with great reluctance. It must, on the other hand, be admitted that all the facts point to an immediately opposite conclusion. He discharged letters in every direction. He published his nomination everywhere. He wrote, three months before he was appointed, to offer Thomas Grenville the Chief Secretaryship. He wrote at the same time to solicit the support of Grattan, and to propose an immediate conference; so that Grattan came at once, accompanied by the Ponsonbys, and full of high hopes, to London.

So much did he put himself in Grattan's hands that, after the disputes that ensued, he left to that statesman the ultimate decision whether he should undertake the Lord Lieutenancy or not. The news of his approaching Viceroyalty became common property in Ireland. This premature revelation, of an appointment in contemplation but not actually settled, was the first of Fitzwilliam's disastrous indiscretions.

It gave a mortal blow to whatever reputation for prudence he may have possessed, and led directly to the unhappy catastrophe which followed. But he did not limit himself to words. He determined to remove Fitzgibbon, the Chancellor, the most powerful man in Ireland. He determined to find high offices, at all costs and by the violent displacement o some of Pitt's oldest adherents, for the two Ponsonbys, the most prominent of the Irish Whigs.

By this time it is clear that Pitt was becoming thoroughly alarmed at the precipitate proceedings of the reversionary Lord Lieutenant. He had told Westmoreland, the actual Viceroy, nothing of any alteration; he did not contemplate any immediate change of system; least of all, would he countenance the removal of the few devoted adherents who had stood by him during the Regency crisis of 1789.

He now discovered to his dismay that Fitzwilliam had already formed his administration, was announcing his policy, and proclaiming from the housetops his future achievements, which included the dismissal of Pitt's principal friends. He uttered a despairing wish that the promised appointment could be annulled; but intimated that at any rate Fitzwilliam could only go to Ireland on the condition that he gave satisfaction on these vital points. The new Whig ministers declared they must resign. Pitt expressed his regret; but he declared that it was impossible for him to consent to the Chancellor's removal, or to leave "either him or any of the supporters of the Government exposed to the risk of the new system."

"I ought to add that the very idea of a new system, (as far as I understand what is meant by that term), and especially one formed without previous communication or concert with the rest of the King's servants here, or with the friends of Government in Ireland, is in itself what I feel it utterly impossible to accede to; and it appears to me to be directly contrary to the general principles on which our union was formed and has hitherto subsisted."

He had nothing to reproach himself with. If the worst came to the worst, "I must struggle as well as I can with a distress which no means are left me to avoid, without a sacrifice both of character and duty."

Grenville, one of Pitt's two confidants in the Cabinet, was not less dismayed; for the talk of new systems and a new predominance was entirely strange to him, and resolutely repudiated by him. At last there was a general explosion; salutary, as it would seem, for it disclosed and appeared to settle the grounds of dispute.

Pitt declared that Fitzwilliam, in his various communications with parties in Ireland, had entirely exceeded his powers, that nothing would induce him to consent to Fitzgibbon's removal, and that he could give no countenance to the idea that Ireland was to be treated as a separate province, outside the general control of the, Government, under the exclusive dominion of the Whig party,

Fitzwilliam appears to have thought that Ireland was made over to him, as were Lampsacus and Magnesia to Themistocles for his bread and his wine; and that Pitt would have no more to do with its government and the policy pursued there than with Finland or Languedoc, This hallucination was due partly to the idiosyncrasy of Fitzwilliam himself, but mainly to the strange proprietary principles of government, to which allusion has already been made, which were held consciously or unconsciously, though quite conscientiously, by the Whig party.

Burke intervened at this juncture with letters of passionate eloquence and pathos. It is scarcely possible even now to read them unmoved. He acknowledged that he was ignorant of the terms on which Portland and his friends had entered the Government. He had the highest opinion of Fitzwilliam, whose virtues be once described as the highest and the most unmixed he had ever known in man.

Nevertheless, he admitted that Fitzwilliam had acted with indiscretion, and that Portland and he had put themselves in the wrong. At first, then, he was doubtful as to what they should do. But at last his mind seemed to be made up.

He despatched a letter on the 16th of October, in which he solemnly summed up the situation. He wrote, he said, as a dying man, with all the freedom and all the dispassionate clearness of that situation, and declared, with "infinite sorrow," "with inexpressible sorrow," that the Whigs must resign.

Four days afterwards, be pronounced, in a letter not less powerful. or less pathetic, a directly opposite opinion. If they went, they must be turned out; they must not resign. "Oh I have pity on yourselves," he broke forth, "and may the God whose counsels are so mysterious in the moral world (even more than in the natural) guide you through all these labyrinths."

In truth, he himself was distracted by contending dreads and scorns: with a living loathing of the Irish system of corruption, but with that loathing overborne by his mastering horror of the French Revolution. Rather than that a schism in the Government of Great Britain should weaken the resistance to that pestilence, let even Ireland stand aside. He was, in fact, incapable of giving advice.

That the terms on which the Whigs joined Pitt did not include any new system of men and measures was positively asserted by Grenville, who was not merely a man of rigid veracity and in the innermost secrets of the Cabinet, but a strong pro-Catholic. Nor is there a particle of proof, or even probability, that there was any such stipulation; for we may be sure that Pitt would never have agreed to part with so large and critical a part of his prerogative.

At last a settlement was arrived at. A final conference was held, at which Pitt, Portland, Fitzwilliam, Spencer, Windham, and Grenville were present; that is to say, Pitt and one follower with four Whigs. Every detail of patronage and policy was exhaustively canvassed and settled. The results were recorded in a sort of protocol, preserved among the Pelham Papers. Fitzwilliam was to go as Lord Lieutenant indeed; but on the explicit understanding that there was to be no new system of men or of measures in Ireland; that he should, if possible, prevent any agitation of the Catholic question during the present session; that, in any case, on that or any other important measure he should transmit all the information which he could collect with his opinion to the Cabinet; and that he should do nothing to commit the Government in such matters without fresh instructions. Thus, one would have thought, was removed all possibility of misunderstanding.

Here, however, was the fundamental mistake. It was impossible for Fitzwilliam, after his detonations and activities of the autumn, to prevent the agitation of the Catholic question; for he was the prime agitator. It would have been as reasonable for Sir Robert Peel to offer Cobden a seat in his cabinet on the condition that he should exert his endeavours to prevent all agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Fitzwilliam. for months past had done nothing but announce his approaching Lord Lieutenancy, and stir up the question. Naturally he found Ireland already in a flame.

Nor did his official action allay it. He landed January 4, 1795. The next day (Monday) he spent in bed. On the Wednesday he summarily dismissed Beresford, a powerful though subordinate officer, a main adviser in Pitt's commercial propositions, and one of Pitt's confidential agents; who was not officially under the Lord Lieutenant at all, but in the Treasury department, that is under Pitt himself.

This act, Pitt, who did not speak at random, characterised as "an open breach of a most solemn promise." Other dismissals followed. Cooke, the Secretary for War, and Sackville Hamilton, the Under Secretary of State, were promptly removed. It was a clean sweep. Fitzgibbon alone remained; and he only because Fitzwilliam was specially pledged not to remove him.

Every faction in Ireland was astir. One party was to be crushed; the other party was to rule. Those with whom Pitt had constantly co-operated in Irish administration were in consternation; for every act of the new Government was directed against them. It was a coup d'etat, a stroke of State, justifiable and even necessary on grounds of high State necessity, or on the presumption of a revolution in policy; but only defensible on such considerations, and even then to be executed with care and judgment.

It was, however, wholly incompatible with the stipulation of Pitt that there was to be no general change in administration or of system; and with his declared, obvious policy to keep clear of domestic embarrassment, when all his energies were required for the war with France.

As to the condition with regard to the Catholics, it would have been impossible to maintain it, even had Fitzwilliam desired to do so. And from the day on which he landed, he bombarded Portland with letters to press for the immediate settlement of the question. To these communications Portland for some weeks gave no reply whatever.

It is urged by Fitzwilliam's apologists that he considered that silence gives consent: a proverb, doubtful at all times, but preposterous as a political plea; more especially absurd, when it is relied upon for guidance in defiance of definite instructions. Fitzwilliam asserted that he was permitted to give the Catholic cause a "handsome support," in case they were resolved to bring it forward. The Government, on their side, declared that he was in no way to commit them without fresh instructions. But, even on the assumption that Fitzwilliam's interpretation was correct, it is clear that such instructions would apply only to a spontaneous movement, and not to one excited by the Viceroy himself..

At last, on the 8th of February (1795) Portland wrote to impress on Fitzwilliam the importance of giving no encouragement to the Catholics, and of not committing himself in any way: the importance, in a word, of his not doing all that he had been going for a month.

On the 9th, Pitt himself wrote, complaining of the dismissal of Beresford. On the 16th Portland wrote to declare at length his views on the Catholic question, and his entire disapproval of the policy of emancipation at that time. A passage from this strictly confidential despatch Fitzwilliam was afterwards so illadvised, to say the least, as to publish, with the most disastrous results.

Even now he did not resign, but answered these communications at length. In his letter to Pitt, he made the unfortunate assertion that Beresford had been guilty of malversation; a charge for which he never produced the slightest evidence, and which in any case he could scarcely have examined judicially in the forty-eight hours that elapsed between his landing and Beresford's dismissal.

To Portland he reiterated long expostulations on the Catholic question. In reply, Portland, who it must be remembered was his party leader as well as his administrative chief, wrote a curt note of censure. The next day (Feb. 19) Fitzwilliam was recalled.

Never was there so hopeless a misunderstanding, or one, after the general exchange of views in October, more incomprehensible. Fitzwilliam published two pompous pamphlets, and declared in his place in Parliament that his recall was due to his having connected himself with Grattan. The Government refused to discuss the matter But it must be admitted that, untoward as was that event, the person most responsible for Fitzwilliam's recall was, as is generally the case in such removals, Fitzwilliam himself. He seems to have been a man of generous sympathies and honest enthusiasm; but not less wrongheaded than headstrong; absolutely devoid of judgment, reticence, and tact. Two months before he set out, Pitt had discovered this, and deplored the decision to send him. His announcements of his appointment before it was made, his unauthorised propaganda, his rash dismissals, his speeches, his protests, his publication from confidential letters after his recall, betoken a man earnest, intrepid, and single-minded, but singularly destitute of the qualities required for a delicate and discretionary mission.

Political Calamity

The importance of his recall may easily be exaggerated, although it was, in truth, a political calamity. Because it was followed by some miserable years, it has been hold to be the cause of the misery of those years. This is surely a misstatement; it was rather a landmark. What in 1795 was called the Catholic question was rather a sign of grace than a measure of real importance.

The mass of the Catholic peasantry already had the franchise under the Emancipation Act of 1792-93, and it imported little to them whether or not a number of gentry of their own persuasion went up to Dublin to be bought and sold at the Castle; it has, indeed, always been a matter of comparative indifference to them whether they were led by Protestants or Catholics. Nor can parliamentary reform, if we may trust witnesses so intelligent and well informed as Emmett and Minevin, be said to have been an object of enthusiasm to the mass of the population. What pinched the people were tithes and oppressive rents; with this distinction, that, whereas for rents they got something, though perhaps not much, for tithes they got less than nothing.

And what excited them were the new prospects presented by the French Revolution. The importance of the recall of Fitzwilliam lies in the fact that he had, however unwarrantably, excited hopes, not of emancipation and reform alone, but of a completely new system; hopes which were shattered by his peremptory removal. So that the quick revulsion produced the blind fury of despair.

The affair still remains obscure; what is clear is that which alone concerns these pages-the part and responsibility of Pitt. It is evident that there was a total misunderstanding; that there was a hopeless discrepancy between the assertion of Fitzwilliam that the removal of Beresford had been tacitly sanctioned by Pitt beforehand, and Pitt's own statement that he considered it a grave breach of a solemn engagement; that the views, declarations, and policy of Fitzwilliam as to a new system of men and measures were irreconcilable with those of Pitt and his colleagues.

It is only necessary, however, to produce one proof that Pitt was in the right, though others are not wanting. All Fitzwilliam's friends in the Cabinet, who loved Fitzwilliam, who disliked and distrusted Pitt; who had entered the Government reluctantly, and who would have embraced any fair opportunity of leaving it; who had been indeed on the brink of resignation with regard to Irish affairs three months before, all these men, Portland and Windham, Spencer and Loughborough, three of them men of the nicest honour, and cognisant of the entire chain of agreements and events, all unhesitatingly took the part of Pitt against Fitzwilliam. Who, indeed, was the minister who, having obtained special responsibility for Ireland by the threat of resignation, now recalled Fitzwilliam? Who but Portland, himself Fitzwilliam's political friend and chief. In that very letter to Grattan which has been mentioned, of the 23d of August 1794, Fitzwilliam says, "I shall look to the system of the Duke of Portland as the model by which I shall regulate the general line of my conduct."

Portland's lethargy had been blamable in the earlier stages of the transaction. But he showed none now. This is a circumstance which appears to bar further controversy. From the mouths of four unquestionable and unwilling witnesses it establishes Pitt's good faith, and the fact that the mistake lay with Fitzwilliam.

We should, however, beware of the slightest confusion between the cause and the effects of Fitzwilliam's recall. That he himself was the cause alters in no respect the unhappy results of his removal. It seems, moreover, clear that the objection was not so much to his policy as to his methods. It was urged by Fitzwilliam that the Catholic question had nothing to do with his removal, but that his dismissals were the real cause.

This statement seems accurate to the extent that the Government was by no means averse to emancipation, but had a rooted distrust of his administrative discretion. Pitt was always ready for concession to Catholics; he showed his readiness before and after, in 1792 and in 1797. There was nothing in 1795 that should change his views. The misfortune was that the Irish could not know his real sentiments, or how he had pushed forward the great emancipation of 1793.

They could only surmise that Fitzwilliani had been removed because he was a reformer, and the Government hostile to all reform. Dublin shut its shutters and went into mourning; while ardent patriots made up their minds that any amendment must come from France or from an appeal to arms.

It would seem at first, therefore, that it would have been far better, as it happened, to allow Fitzwilliam to fulfil his own promises, and to carry out his own programme. But a moment's reflection shows that this was impossible. There was the direst of all obstacles -- a sunken rock.

The King had been approached; his honour and his conscience had been moved by the most insidious and most impracticable of arguments. For he had been told that, should he consent to the admission of Catholics to political office, he would break his Coronation oath, and forfeit the crown. In that narrow, and obstinate, but scrupulous mind, this belief was now irrevocably imbedded. Fitzwilliam's policy would, therefore, have been shattered against the King's immovable and impregnable position on the Catholic question : immovable as regards himself, because he believed that emancipation involved the personal guilt of perjury; impregnable against opposition, because it was based on the passions and prejudices of the great mass of the people of Great Britain.

And, as soon as he scented the Catholic question, the King urged Fitzwilliam's removal. So the impartial thinker can only once more lament that the mission of Fitzwilliam adds another instance of that curse of mischance that has always assisted the curse of misgovernment to poison the relations between England and Ireland.

Bad to Worse

And now things went from bad to worse. In September of this year (1795) the Orange Society arose. The Catholic organisation of the Defenders was already in full operation. The United Irishmen availed themselves of both these leagues. Agrarian outrage and the plunder of arms abounded. In Ulster there was an organised persecution to drive the Catholics out of the province "to hell or Connaught."

In 1796 all these evils were aggravated by the enrolment of the yeomanry, an undisciplined and uncontrollable force. In December of that year, a French expedition under Roche invaded Ireland, but effected nothing. In 1797, the state of the North was hardly distinguishable from civil war. It was placed under martial law. A population, which had long been arming for rebellion, was disarmed by harsh and summary methods. The Government had some 60,000 soldiers and militia quartered in Ireland. There were violent reprisals on the part of the military for the outrages that had been committed by the United Irishmen and Defenders.

The year darkened as it passed. The gaols were full. Men under suspicion were crimped and sent to serve in the fleet. Some even attributed the mutiny at the Nore to the element thus introduced into the Navy. Patrols pervaded the country all night. There was disaffection among the troops.

The Catholics fled from Ulster. On the one side there were murders, roastings, plunder of arms, and a reign of terror; on the 'Other, picketing, scourging, hanging-half or whole- houseburning, and a reign of not less terror. The miseries of the Thirty Years' War were scarcely more appalling; for it was civil conflict of the most terrible kind, the worse because it was not declared; it was anarchy inflamed by fanaticism; while the Parliament and the Government, that should have remedied and appeased, were themselves beyond help or hope. The first could only acquiesce in the proposals of the last; the last could only appeal for more soldiers to England.

In 1798, the rebellion, in breaking out, lost something of its horror. The rising was fixed for the 23d of May; and on that day it flamed forth in the counties of Dublin, Meath, and Kildare. It does not come within the compass of this narrative to describe that insurrection, its massacres and retaliations. That it was not even more formidable maybe attributed to two causes: Ulster held aloof, and the French came too late. As it was, the rebellion lasted barely a month, and was both local and partial.

It is, however, worth noting here what Pitt wrote to an eminent Irishman on this subject. To the account of the duel which he had sent to Wellesley he adds: "You will hear that in, Ireland the Jacobins (after many of their leaders being apprehended) have risen in open war. The contest has at present existed about a week. The Government have acted with great spirit, and the troops of all descriptions behave incomparably. We cannot yet judge how far it may spread, but I trust with the present force and some augmentation from hence, the rebellion will be crushed, before any attempt can be made from France: and we must, I think, follow up such an event by immediate steps for a union."

As to the behaviour of the troops Pitt was certainly ill informed. But in such a matter he would not be likely to know much. The internal administration of Ireland was entirely independent of England. There he had neither knowledge nor control, unless specially appealed to.

After all was over, after, as an Irishman said, "rebellion and its attendant horrors had roused on both sides to the highest pitch all the strongest feelings of our nature," he may have heard of the atrocities in Ireland with much the same emotions that later ministers may have experienced in learning the horrors of the Indian mutiny and the horrors of its repression. We know this, that when Clare attempted in his hearing a defence of the malpractices of the magistrates and the militia, Pitt "turned . . . round with that high indignant stare which sometimes marked his countenance, and stalked out of the House."

At the close of the revolt a now Viceroy arrived. Cornwallis, whose career had been marked by one supreme military disaster, had obliterated it by his industry, his honesty, and his public spirit. He had not perhaps conspicuous abilities; but this deficiency only brings into greater prominence the sterling splendour of his character; and he remains a signal example of unsparing, unselfish, patriotic devotion to duty. But here his lines were cast in evil places.

The one lesson of the rebellion was that the whole system of Irish government must be remodelled. What form the now experiment should take had long been tacitly admitted, and Cornwallis came over to carry a legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland.

If the dismissal of Fitzwilliain may be said to touch the rim of a volcano, the Union is the burning fiery furnace of the crater itself. Something, however, is admitted with regard to it on all sides. The Parliament that passed the Scottish Union in 1707 had been elected directly in view of that question, which entirely engrossed the national mind.

The Parliament that in 1800 passed the Irish Union had been elected in 1797, with no more reference to the question of the termination of its own existence than to free education or female suffrage. So far from the nation being consulted in respect to the obliteration of its legislature , there was not, even after the conclusion of the treaty, any popular election held for the members to be sent to London; but lots were drawn among those elected under such totally different circumstances and for such totally different purposes. Nor is it denied that this Irish Parliament, so wholly without mandate, and probably without power to terminate itself (though this is still subject of contention), was practically bribed and bullied out of existence.

The corruption was black, hideous, horrible; revolting at any time, atrocious when it is remembered that it was a nation's birthright that was being sold. It was perhaps less questionable in those days to buy up the nomination boroughs, or most of them, as chattels at a fixed tariff. Pitt had made a like proposition for England in his plan of parliamentary reform. Close boroughs then represented not merely a vested interest, but property of the most tangible and recognised kind. But what stands without either shame or palliation was the remodelling, in the autumn and winter of 1799, of the House of Commons, after it had rejected the Union propositions.

Between the close of the session of 1799 and the beginning of that of 1800, between June and January, sixty-three seats out of a total of three hundred were vacated. Some of those who had held them were cajoled; some were bribed into office and out of Parliament; the mass departed because the patrons of their boroughs had been bought over to the Union.

In this way, without a dissolution, the whole complexion and constitution of the House were changed. In the session of 1799 the Irish Parliament rejected the propositions of the Government for a Union. When Parliament was opened in 1800, there was not the slightest allusion to the measure of Union in the speech from the throne; but thirtynine writs were at once moved.

The entire patronage and terror of the Crown were employed to pack Parliament and purchase the patrons of Parliament. It rained honey and gall as occasion required-offices and peerages, or dismissal and disgrace. Castlereagh, now Chief Secretary, and the executive agent in this degrading traffic, pursued his task without flinching or remorse. Not Strafford was more thorough. Cornwallis expressed his loathing and disgust of the whole transaction. Castlereagh neither felt nor expressed any. He in fact hoped that corruption would die of a sort of surfeit; that it would perish by this final exaggeration; and that by one supreme, shameless, wholesale effort he could put an end to it for ever.

Under these circumstances and auspices, the measure was passed in 1800, both in Ireland and in England. The Irish debates produced much fine and significant speaking, in which Poster against, and Fitzgibbon (now Clare) for the Union, bore off the palm; many weighty predictions from such men as Parsons and Grattan, that a Union so forced on would inevitably imperil the entire connection between the two countries; some ominous prophecies of the sinister influence that the Irish contingent would exercise over British politics.

Charlemont, indeed, had always opposed any Union, on the ground that no other measure could so effectually contribute to the separation of the two countries. In Ireland itself there was a comparative apathy, produced by the ruinous struggles of the last few years; only in Dublin, the dying capital, was there a last agony of patriotism.

On the other hand, all the efforts of the Government, unrelentingly applied, could produce but a few thinly-signed petitions in support of the Bill -- not a twelfth of those against it. It passed by purchase. "The whole unbribed intellect of Ireland," says air eminent historian, "was opposed to it."

Of the members who composed the majority in its favour, it is computed that only seven voted for it without any 11 consideration." In the House of Commons the minority set their names to an address recapitulating the evils and ignominies of the measure; in the House of Lords it was followed by an eloquent protest headed by Leinster, the only Irish duke, and completed by such signatures as those of Downshire and Meath, and Moira and Powerscourt. After an easy passage through the British Parliament, it received the royal assent in July.

With regard to the Union two separate questions have to be considered. Firstly, were the means by which it was carried justifiable? Secondly, was it a right measure in itself? On both these points it is necessary to keep in mind the preliminary remark that has been made. It is easy on the brink of the twentieth century to censure much in the eighteenth; but is it candid to do so without placing oneself as far as possible in the atmosphere, circumstances, and conditions of the period which one is considering? Have Pitt's critics done this? Have they judged him by the standards and ideas of his time, and not by the standards and ideas of their own I That is the spirit in which History judges statesmen, and for a simple reason: had they attempted to carry into effect in their generation the ideas of ours, they would not have been statesmen at all.

They would have been voices crying in the wilderness; they might have been venerated as well-intentioned visionaries, or imprisoned as agitators, and even as lunatics; but statesmen they would not have been in name or in fact. A statesman measures the opinions and forces that surround him, and proceeds to act accordingly; he is not laying his account with remote posterity, or legislating for it. The politician who is a century before his time is hardly more a statesman than the politician who is a century behind it. The man who doses a child with colchicum, or who attempts to cure atrophy by bleeding, is neither in name nor in fact a physician.

To apply what is wholesome at one stage of growth or of disease to an age or an ailment totally different is merely dangerous quackery. To the man who attempts such mortal mischief in politics is commonly denied the power; and for this reason doctrines in advance of the age, as they are called, are usually the copyright of philosophers entirely dissociated from affairs. It is in this spirit that History, truly and justly written, apportions blame and praise to men, judging by contemporary canons and not by ours. It is thus that History weighs in her balance Caesar, and Richelieu, and William III, and Ximenes, and Oxenstiern. Were it otherwise, she would hold the third Duke of Richmond, with his universal suffrage and annual parliaments, a greater statesman than Pitt, or Burke, or any of his contemporaries.

To Pitt alone is meted out a different measure. He alone is judged, not by the end of the eighteenth, but by the end of the nineteenth century. And why? Because the Irish question which he attempted to settle is an unsettled question still.

He alone of the statesmen of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Burke and perhaps Chesterfield, saw its importance and grappled with it manfully. Since then many ministers have nibbled at it whose efforts are buried in decent obscurity. But Pitt's career is still the battle-field of historians and politicians, because he is responsible for the treaty of Union; and because he resigned and did not do something, neither known nor specified but certainly impossible, to carry what remained of Catholic Emancipation.

Of the corruption by which the Union was carried something remains to be noted. It was, admittedly, wholesale and horrible. But it must in fairness be remembered that this was the only method known of carrying on Irish government; the only means of passing any measure through the Irish Parliament; that, so far from being an exceptional phase of politics, it was only three or four years of Irish administration rolled into one.

No Irish patriot can regard the Union as other than the sale of his Parliament, justifiable or unjustifiable according to his politics; but, for an English minister of that day, the purchase of that Parliament was habitual and invariable. The quotations of the parliamentary market were as well known as the quotations of wheat and of sugar. It is scarcely possible to open a letter from an Irish Viceroy or an Irish Secretary of that time without finding a calculation for the hire, open and avowed, of some individual or influence; or some cynical offer by some hungry nobleman of his interest for a determined price.

It was the ordinary daily life of Dublin Castle; it was the air which the Government breathed; the nourishment which alone enabled it to exist. No one condemned it, any more than the neighbours of Washington condemned him for owning slaves. And the reason is simple. The Irish Executive was appointed in England solely with reference to English considerations; the Parliament through which this Executive had to pass its measures was an Irish Parliament, elected, so far as it was freely elected, with reference to Irish considerations. The Government and its policy were entirely exotic; and the attempt to root them in Irish soil was a perpetual strife with nature.

An artificial temperature had to be formed for them, and that was corruption. A means of bringing the Government and the Parliament into relations had to be found, and that was corruption. A means of carrying Government measures through Parliament had to be discovered, and that was corruption. For a government which rules in disregard or defiance of Parliament must resort to bribery or resort to force. There was no force available; corruption therefore was the indispensable agency.

The absolute severance of the Executive and the Legislature both in nature and origin produced an unnatural and unworkable condition of affairs; it was only by bribery that the machine could be set going at all. The great measure of Catholic Emancipation was only carried in 1792-93 by Castle influence; that is, by direct or indirect corruption through a reluctant Parliament.

Had Fitzwilliam been allowed to carry the complement of these bills in 1795, he could only have done it by the same means. The Executive was in no way responsible to Parliament; had Parliament been unanimous in opposition, it could not have changed a minister. Any bill, therefore, that the Government wished to pass was a subject of separate, negotiation with the jobbers of the country. These were generally recalcitrant in proportion to their power, and had to be purchased accordingly. There were in reality no constituencies for the Government to appeal to. As out of the 300 members of the House 124 were nominated by 52 peers, and 64 by 36 commoners, it was with the owners of the constituencies that the Government had to deal.

It must be understood, then, that corruption was not a monstrous, abnormal characteristic of the Union; it was the everyday life and atmosphere of Irish politics. Was it not better, it may be then urged, that this system should end? Was it not better, at the worst, and once for all, to make a regiment of peers and an army of baronets, to buy the rotten boroughs at the price of palaces, than to go on in the vile old way, hiring, haggling, jobbing, from one dirty day to another, from one miserable year to another, without hope or self-respect; poisoning the moral sense, and betraying the honest judgment of the country, in the futile, endless attempt to maintain the unnatural predominance, and the unreal connection, of an alien executive and a sectional legislature? If the answer be Yes, the means are to that extent justified, for there were no others.

It may, however, be said, that even if it be granted that the system was vile and rightly ended, and ended by the only practicable methods, it might have been replaced by something better than the Union. To some of us now living this seems clear enough; but had we lived then, is it certain that our judgment would have been the same?

We were engaged in a war, not of winter quarters and of summer quarters, and of elegant expeditions some way off, and of musketeers in laced gloves and periwigs saying, "entlemen, fire first," not a war of the eighteenth century: but naked men were fighting for life and freedom with despair; they were crossing the ice barefoot in rags; they were capturing fleets with cavalry; both we and our foes believed it to be a struggle between existence and extinction.

Fortunately, it ended in existence for us, nearly exhausted and in terrible debt, but still existence.

Uncertainty

At the end of the eighteenth century, however, such a result was by no means certain. We formed the main object of an enemy, who had conquered half Europe. Thrice had that enemy invaded Ireland, and it was certain that an invasion of England was only a question of time.

In so appalling a crisis, a new arrangement had, by the admission of all parties, to be formed for Ireland. Grattan himself had tacitly given up his own Parliament as hopeless; for he had withdrawn from it, and encouraged the discussion of Irish affairs in the British legislature. What wonder, then, if from the natural tendency to draw closer and closer and closer yet, in the presence of an overpowering danger, men's minds should have turned with rare unanimity to the idea of a Union. During a campaign even a single Parliament sometimes seems a superfluity, and a second a danger.

What would happen, if in war, as on the Regency question, the British Parliament should take one line, and the Irish Parliament the other? If, however, they became united, it would be safe, in view of the overwhelming Protestant majority in England and Scotland, to give concessions that otherwise would be impossible to the overwhelming Catholic majority in Ireland. Internal free trade would give Ireland material prosperity, but without a Union the British commercial classes would not hear of any such arrangement.

Neither concession, neither Catholic relief nor internal free trade, would in the then temper of men's minds have had a chance of acceptance in England, so long as they were made to the independent parliament of a hostile nation. But on Catholic relief and on internal free trade Pitt's mind was set.

Again, if a Union were achieved, there would be no focus for French intrigue. The Executive of the two countries had always been practically one: to make the two Parliaments one would place the conditions of Government on a natural basis. But, above all, was the consideration that Great Britain would now face the world with a united front, with a single Parliament in which the elements of loyalty and stability would be in an incalculable majority.

These arguments, whatever may now be thought of their value, appealed with irresistible force to statesmen, for whom, struggling in a great war, unity and simplicity of government were everything. But Pitt never thought, as some seem since to have thought, that the Union could stand alone; he never deemed it a divine instrument, admirable and venerable by its own natural essence. He considered it as only a part, and not even the most important part, of a great healing policy in Ireland; and that, almost if not quite simultaneously, the other parts should be applied; the last limitations of the Catholics removed; the clergy other than those of the Established Church provided with stipends; the oppression of tithe abolished.

These were inseparable constituents of his scheme. Had his hands been free, he might have even dealt with the evils of the land system, at least as regards absenteeism. Who will say that, followed up by large, spontaneous, and simultaneous concessions of this kind, the policy of the Union might not have been a success? Had Pitt, in face of the difficulties that presented themselves, temporarily dropped Catholic Emancipation, and only carried a Tithe Bill in 1801, the Union might at least have had a fair start.

Frere, who knew Pitt well, declared that it was not true that Pitt ever regarded Catholic Emancipation as a sop to be offered to the Irish to make them accept the Union. On the contrary, he regarded, as Frere know, the Emancipation of the Catholics as the more important measure of the two, and he would gladly have carried it at any time. The Union was to pave the way and conciliate British opinion.

"The word Union," Pitt's Lord Lieutenant wrote, as he was passing the measure, "will not cure the evils of this wretched country; it is a necessary preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." That was Pitt's view. But on this necessary preliminary or foundation succeeding ministries reared either structures he had never contemplated, or no structure at all. He passed the Union with one object; it has been diverted to another.

There was a curse upon it. It drove its very author from office in the full plenitude of his authority, in the very moment of the triumph of passing it. Never did Pitt hold power again ; for his last two years of suffering and isolation do not deserve the name. And so all went wrong. The measure of Union stood alone. And it was one of the drawbacks of that luckless measure that it left all the remaining machinery of independence when it took away the Parliament; every other characteristic of a separate state, everything to remind men of what had been. It was like cutting the face out of a portrait and leaving the picture in the frame.

The fragment of policy flapped forlornly on the deserted mansions of the capital, but there was enough to remind men of what had been. It was impossible, for example, to destroy that Ionian colonnade which remains one of the glories of Dublin. So the Government transformed into a bank the noble hall which had resounded with some of the highest flights of human eloquence, which was indissolubly connected with such names as Flood and Grattan and Charlemont, and which was imperishably imbued with the proud memories of an ancient nationality. Men as they passed murmured that that was the home of their Parliament, which nothing had obliterated and nothing had replaced.

But all that man could do was done to obliterate the rest of Pitt's policy. Addington's Irish Government went over with express instructions to do nothing for the Catholics, nothing for the Dissenters, but to push and promote the Established Church in every way. The Union alone remained even to indicate what Pitt's plan had been; and that was a misleading indication. Catholic Emancipation waited for thirty, and Tithe Reform waited for near forty, embittered and venomed years. The time for ecclesiastical stipends provided by the State passed away for ever.

The bright promises of financial improvement that had been held out to Ireland faded away into bankruptcy. Seventy years afterwards, the Irish Church Establishment, which it had been one of the main objects of the Treaty to preserve, suddenly toppled over and disappeared. With it went the keystone of the Union. And so it is Pitt's sinister destiny to be judged by the petty fragment of a large policy which he did not live to carry out: a policy, unhappy in execution and result, but which was, it may be fairly maintained, as generous and comprehensive in conception as it was patriotic in motive. It was at any rate worth trying, where so many had failed.

But it had no trial; the experiment was scarcely even commenced; and the ruinous part that remains, exposed as it has been to the harshest storms of nine decades, is judged and venerated as if it were the entire structure.

Chapter XII: Pitt and Wellesley