wealth, and tradition may be welded together for common action, provided
that the union be voluntary and the freedom of the separate parts be
preserved. The first conditions of a true union were lacking in the case
of Ireland. The arrangement was not voluntary. It was accompanied by
gross breach of faith, and it signified enslavement, not liberty.

A true Union was not even attempted. The Government of Ireland, in
effect, and for the most part in form, was still that of a conquered
Colonial Dependency. It was no more representative in any practical
sense after the Union than before the Union. The popular vote was
submerged in a hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded
rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own degradation,
the Union having been purchased with titles, and titles having been for
a century past the price paid for the servility of Anglo-Irish
statesmen. But the peerage, in the persons of the twenty-eight
representatives sent to Westminster, still remained a powerful nucleus
of anti-Irish opinion, infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish
prejudice, and often opposing a last barrier to reform when the
opposition of the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome.
In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were obtained,
not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence in Ireland itself.
There was still a separate Executive in Ireland, a separate system of
local administration, and until 1817 a separate financial system, all of
them wholly outside Irish control. The only change of constitutional
importance was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his
autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown Colony,
were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a member of the British
Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of Government increased, there grew
up that grotesque system of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at
the present day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole