outrages, the terror of secret societies, the stern enforcement of law
which to the people represented anything but justice, are phenomena of
Irish society, which, as they existed before the Volunteers established
the Parliamentary independence of the country, and continued to exist
when Ireland was subject to no laws but those passed by an Irish
Parliament, cannot be attributed to the Act of Union. That enactment
introduced a purely political change. It could not, except very
indirectly, either increase or remove evils which it did not affect to
touch. To two charges its authors are indeed, with more or less of
justice, liable; they committed the intellectual error of supposing that
a change or improvement in the form of the Constitution would remove
evils due to social and economical causes; they committed the moral
error of thinking that a beneficial enactment might allowably be passed
by means which outraged all the best moral feeling of Ireland. Their
mistakes are worth notice. England is again told that a Constitutional
change is the remedy for Irish misery. Ethical considerations (in this
case the moral rights of a loyal minority and the legal rights of Irish
landlords) are, it is again intimated, to be held of slight account
compared with the benefit to Ireland and to England which is to be
expected from an experiment in Constitution-making. To impartial
observers it may appear that the proposed policy of 1886 threatens to
reproduce in its essence the errors and the vices of the policy of 1800.
Be this as it may, the reflection that the ill results of the Act of
Union are mainly negative suggests the conclusion that the good results
(if any) of its repeal would probably be negative also, and clears the
way for the question with which we are immediately concerned, namely,
What are the actual and undoubted evils to England of maintaining a
legislative union with Ireland?

[Sidenote: The evils of maintaining the Union]