"Collieries where there is no coal, for bridges where there are no
rivers, navigable cuts where there is no water, harbours where
there are no ships, and churches where there are no congregations."
And when the Union was finally on its way, Hamilton Rowan, one of the
founders of the United Irishmen, then in exile in America, wrote home to
his father: "I congratulate you on the report which spreads here that a
Union is intended. In that measure I see the downfall of one of the most
corrupt assemblies, I believe, that ever existed."[10]
It is little wonder that men of good will in Ireland prayed to be
delivered from such a Parliament. Molyneux, the first of the Irish
Parliamentary patriots, whose book, "The Case of Ireland's being
Governed by Laws made in England Stated," was burnt by the common
hangman, pleaded indeed for a reformed and independent Parliament, but
only because fair representation in the English Parliament was at the
time "a happiness they could hardly hope for." And a few years later the
Irish House, in congratulating Queen Anne on the Union of England and
Scotland, added, "May God put it into your royal heart to add greater
strength and lustre to your Crown by a yet more comprehensive Union."
The English Parliament, through sheer lethargy and carelessness, missed
at this time an opportunity which would have peacefully launched Ireland
on her career on an equality with Scotland and England, and must have
profoundly modified the relations of the two countries. Immediate
prosperity, in the case of a land wasted by a century of strife and
bloodshed, was not indeed to be hoped for any more than in the case of
Scotland, which had still two armed rebellions, and much bickering and
jealousy in store before settling down to peaceful development. But if
Ireland had been granted her petitions for Union in 1703 and 1707, and
had thus secured equal laws and equal trading privileges, she would at
any rate have emerged from her period of trial and discord not later
than Scotland, and would have anticipated the economic and social
advantages predicted by Adam Smith,[11] when he says--
"By a union with Great Britain, Ireland would gain, besides the
freedom of trade, other advantages much more important, and which
would much more than compensate any increase of taxes that might
accompany that union. By the union with England, the middling and
inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance
from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed
them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people
of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance
from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not
founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable
distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all
distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices....
Without a union with Great Britain, the inhabitants of Ireland are
not likely, for many ages, to consider themselves as one people."
Pitt, who was proud to proclaim himself the pupil of Adam Smith in
politics and in economics, found himself, a quarter of a century after
these words were written, in a position to carry out, in face of great
difficulties and dangers at home and abroad, the beneficent reform
advocated by his great master--a reform which, as we have seen, could
have been carried a century earlier without any difficulty whatever. But
the century that had been wasted involved many concurrent miseries and
misfortunes: social and economic stagnation, an intensification of
religious and racial bitterness, conspiracy, and invasion; savage
outbreaks savagely repressed. When the time comes to measure up the
rights and wrongs of those dark days, the judgment on England will
assuredly be that her fault was not the carrying of the Union, but the
delaying of that great measure of reform and emancipation until it was
almost too late.
The story of the Union has been told and retold in the utmost detail
throughout the century. The present writer has attempted quite recently
to summarise it,[12] and there is little to add. The charge that it was
carried by corruption is simply another way of saying that it had,
constitutionally, to be passed through the Dublin Parliament, that body
which, from the days of Swift's invective to those of its final
condemnation, lived and moved and had its being solely in and by
corruption. As Lord Castlereagh, who had charge of the Bill in the Irish
House of Commons, put it, the Government was forced to recognise the
situation and its task was "to buy out and secure to the Crown forever
the fee simple of Irish corruption, which has so long enfeebled the
power of Government and endangered the connection."