[Sidenote: 3. Strict government in Ireland.]

_Thirdly_.--If the Union is to be maintained with advantage to any part
of the United Kingdom, the people of the United Kingdom must make the
most strenuous, firm, and continuous effort, lasting, it may well be,
for twenty years or more, to enforce throughout every part of the United
Kingdom obedience to the law of the land. This effort can only be
justified by the equally strenuous determination (which must involve an
infinity of trouble) to give ear to every Irish complaint, and to see
that the laws which the Irish people obey are laws of justice, and (what
is much the same thing) laws which in the long run the people of Ireland
will feel to be just. To carry out this course of action is difficult
for all governments, is perhaps specially difficult for a democratic
government. To maintain the Union is no easy task, though it has yet to
be proved that any form of Home Rule will give more ease to the people
of England; nor can the difficulty be got rid of, though it may be
somewhat changed, by abolishing the Irish representation in Parliament,
or by treating Ireland as a Crown colony. Such steps, which could hardly
be termed maintenance of the Union, might, as expedients for carrying
through safely a course of reform, be morally and for a time
justifiable. Their adoption is, however, liable to an almost insuperable
objection. Democracy in Great Britain does not comport with official
autocracy in Ireland. Every government must be true to its principles,
and a democracy which played the benevolent despot would suffer
demoralisation.

[Sidenote: Good results of the Union.]

The Act of Union has been the aim of so much random invective that its