good fruits (for it has borne good no less than evil fruits) are in
danger of being forgotten. It ended once and for all an intolerable
condition of affairs, and its scope will never be understood unless its
enactments are read in the lurid light cast upon them by the rebellion
of 1798. The hateful means used to obtain an apparently good end have
cast a slur on the reputation of more than one high-toned statesman.
Humanity, in the case of Cornwallis at least, had far more share than
ambition in his determination to abolish the Irish Parliament. His
anxiety in 1798 to save Catholics and rebels from oppression was as keen
and as noble as the anxiety of Canning in 1858 to protect the natives of
India from the resentments excited by the Mutiny. Every reason which in
our own day after the Gordon riots made it necessary to abolish the
ancient constitution of Jamaica told in 1800 in favour of abolishing the
still more ancient Parliament of Ireland. If statesmen, bent on
restoring at least the rule of law and peace in a distracted country,
fancied that the corruption of the legislature might be counted a low
price to pay for protecting the mass of the population from the rule or
the vengeance of a faction, they committed a grave moral error. But
their mistake was more pardonable than it seems to modern critics, and
the lesson which it teaches--that you cannot base a just policy upon a
foundation of iniquity--is one which the modern censors of Pitt may well
lay to heart. However this may be, the transactions which discredited
the passing of the Act of Union give no ground for repealing it, and,
except to a rhetorician in want of an _argumentum ad hominem_, it will
never appear that the philosophic historian who maintains that the
Treaty of Union was ill-conceived and premature, contradicts the
political philosopher who contends that to repeal the Union would be not
to cancel but to aggravate the evils of an historical error. The
considerations which recommend or require the maintenance of the Union
are often forgotten, but are obvious.