existed. The same game of cross-purposes went on in the Home Rule
debates of 1886 and 1893, and reappeared but this year in a debate of
the House of Lords (July 4, 1911), when the Roman Catholic Home Ruler,
Lord MacDonnell, eulogized Grattan's Parliament in answer to Lord
Londonderry, the Protestant Unionist landlord, who painted it in its
true colours. Yet Lord Londonderry springs from the class and school of
Charlemont, who, by refusing to act as an Irishman, hastened the ruin of
the Parliament which Lord Londonderry satirizes, and Lord MacDonnell
from the race which was betrayed by that Parliament. The anomaly need
not surprise us. It is not stranger than the fact that the Union would
never have been carried without Catholic support in Ireland.

The point we have to grasp is that Ireland was a victim to the crudity
and falsity of the political ideas current at the time of the Union,
persistent all over the Empire for long afterwards, and not extinct yet.
Between Separation, personified by Tone, and Union, personified by
Fitzgibbon, and carried by those milder statesmen, Castlereagh and Pitt,
there seemed to be no alternative. Actually there was and is an
alternative: a responsible Irish Parliament and Government united to
England by sympathy and interest.

The Parliamentary history of the Union does not much concern us.
Bribery, whether by titles, offices, or cash, had always been the normal
means of securing a Government majority in the Irish House of Commons.
Corruption was the only means of carrying the vote for the Union, and
the time and labour needed for securing that vote are a measure of the
rewards gained by those who formed the majority. Disgusting business as
it was, we have to admit that a Parliament which refused to reform
itself at the bidding of all that was best and healthiest in Ireland
did, on its own account, deserve extinction. The sad thing is that the