Kingdom franchise, that is, eighty-five years after the Union, that the
Irish representation was a true numerical reflection of the Irish
democracy. But these were not vital matters. In the Home Rule campaigns
of 1886 and 1893, Irish opinion, constitutionally expressed, was
impotent. The vital matter was that the Union killed all wholesome
political life in Ireland, destroyed the last chance of promoting
harmony among Irishmen, and transferred the settlement of Irish
questions to an ignorant and prejudiced tribunal, incapable of
comprehending these questions, much less of adjudicating upon them with
any semblance of impartiality.

The Legislative Union was unnatural. The two islands, near as they were
to each other, were on different planes of civilization, wealth, and
economic development, without a common tradition, a common literature,
or a common religion. Each had a temperament and genius of its own, and
each needed a different channel of expression. Laws applicable to one
island were meaningless or noxious in the other; taxation applicable to
a rich industrial island was inappropriate and oppressive for a poor
agricultural island. And upon a system comprising all these
incompatibilities there was grafted the ruinous principle of ascendancy.

There is nothing inherently strange about the difference between England
and Ireland. Artificial land-frontiers often denote much sharper
cleavages of sentiment, character, physique, language, history. A
sea-frontier sometimes makes a less, sometimes a more, effective line of
delimitation. Denmark and Sweden, France and England, are examples.
Nor, on the other hand, did the profound differences between Ireland and
England preclude the possibility of their incorporation in a political
system under one Crown. We know, by a mass of experience from Federal
and other systems, that elements the most diverse in language, religion,