In Newry an attempt was made to put up an anti-Unionist candidate, but the Roman Catholic Bishop, Dr. Lennan, met and repulsed the intruder in militant fashion. "Mr. Bell," he reports to Archbishop Troy, "declined the poll, and surrendered yesterday. The Catholics stuck together like the Macedonian phalanx, and with ease were able to turn the scale in favour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer."
To the Irish Catholic at the time of the Union, the Dublin legislature was, indeed, in the words of Mr. Denys Scully, a leading Catholic layman, "not our Parliament, for we had no share in it, but their Club-house."
The summing up of the whole matter is perhaps best expressed in the measured judgment of Mr. John Morley in his study of the life of Edmund Burke. Burke, in an evil moment for himself and for Ireland, had lent himself in 1785 to what Mr. Morley called the "factious" and "detestable" course of Fox and the English Whig leaders in destroying Pitt's Commercial Propositions.
"Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session" (writes Burke's biographer)[13] "he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the emancipation of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination and for her installation as a corporate member of the Empire—the only position permanently possible for her. … A substantial boon was sacrificed amid bonfires and candles to the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence. The result must have convinced Pitt more firmly than ever that his great master, Adam Smith, was right in predicting that nothing short of the Union of the two countries would deliver Ireland out of the hands of her fatuous chiefs and of their too worthy followers."
What would Mr. John Morley, the historian who wrote those words in the prime of his intellectual strength and judgment, have said if any one had told him that in his old age Lord Morley, the politician, would have been actively engaged in assisting another generation of "fatuous chiefs" and still more worthy followers to sacrifice the true interests of Ireland in the pursuit of "the phantom of Irish Legislative Independence"?
AFTER THE UNION.
That the Union to some extent failed in the beneficent effects which it was calculated to produce in Ireland is only another instance of the working of the "curse of mis-chance" which has so often, before and since, interposed to thwart the intentions of statesmen in their dealings with the two countries. Pitt, Castlereagh, and Cornwallis, the three men chiefly concerned in planning the change, were all agreed in explaining that the Union was not a policy complete in itself, but was only the necessary foundation upon which a true remedial policy was to be based. As Lord Cornwallis said at the time, "the word 'Union' will not cure the ills of this wretched country. It is a necessary preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." Catholic Emancipation, a series of parliamentary, educational, financial, and economic reforms, and the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the visible symbol of separatism and dependence, were all essential portions of Pitt's scheme. But Pitt was destined to sink into an early grave without seeing any of them materially furthered. Treacherous colleagues and the threatened insanity of the King blocked the way of some of them: England's prolonged struggle for existence against the power of Napoleon, involving as it did financial embarrassment and a generation of political reaction, accounted for the rest.
Pitt and Castlereagh resigned on the King's refusal to accept their advice, "and so," as Lord Rosebery says,[14] "all went wrong." It was "like cutting the face out of a portrait and leaving the picture in the frame. The fragment of policy flapped forlornly on the deserted mansions of the capital." A generation of agitation, strife, and discontent was to pass before Emancipation was carried, and the reforms had to wait still longer. Meanwhile a wonderful change of front had taken place. The leading opponents of the Union—Plunket, Foster, Beresford—even Grattan himself—came to accept it, and, in some cases, figured as its warmest defenders. And the Catholic Party, whom we have seen so strongly supporting the Union, gradually grew into opponents. Daniel O'Connell, whose brother and uncle were the leading supporters of the Union candidate for Kerry, started a formidable agitation first for Emancipation and then for Repeal of the Union. In the former he succeeded because enlightened public opinion in both countries was on his side: in the latter he failed utterly, both parties in Great Britain and a large section in Ireland being inflexibly opposed to any such reactionary experiment. In the end O'Connell died disillusioned and broken-hearted, and the Repeal movement disappeared from the field of Irish politics till revived many years later in the form of Home Rule.
But whilst recognising the fact that the Union, owing to the causes stated, failed partially, and for a time, to respond to all the anticipations of its authors, readers must be warned against accepting the wild and woeful tales of decay and ruin that were recklessly circulated for propagandist purposes by O'Connell and the Repealers. Many people who are content to take their facts at second hand have thus come to believe that the legislative Union changed a smiling and prosperous Kingdom into a blighted province where manufactures and agriculture, commerce and population fell into rapid and hopeless decline. Needless to say, things do not happen in that way: economic changes, for better or for worse, are slow and gradual and depend on natural causes, not on artificial. Ireland has not, as a whole, kept in line with nineteenth-century progress, and her population, after a striking increase for over forty years, showed under peculiar causes an equally striking decrease; but to assert that her course has been one of universal decay and of decay dating from the Union is to say what is demonstrably untrue.
It was inevitable that a city of very limited industry like Dublin should suffer from the disappearance of its Parliament, which brought into residence for some months in every year some hundreds of persons of wealth and distinction. It was also inevitable that the mechanical inventions to which we have already alluded—the steam-engine, the "spinning jenny," and the "mule"—which revolutionised the world's industry, should have their effect in Ireland also. Under primitive conditions, with lands almost roadless and communications slow, difficult and costly, the various districts of any country had of necessity to produce articles of food and clothing to satisfy their requirements, or they had to go without. With the progress of invention, and with the opening up of the world by roads and canals, a totally different state of things presents itself. Industries tend to become centralised—the fittest survive and grow, the unfit wither away. This is what occurred in many districts of England and Scotland, and the course of events was naturally the same in Ireland.
When we read of small towns now lying idle, which in the eighteenth century produced woollen cloth, linen, cotton, fustian, boots, hats, glass, beer, and food products, it simply means that a more highly organised system of industry has in its progress left such districts behind in the race. The woollen manufacture has centred in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, linen in Belfast, and so forth—one district dwindled as others advanced and tended to monopolise production, without the legislature having anything to say to it. To say that this or that manufacture is not so prosperous in Ireland as it was a century ago before power looms, spindles, steamships, and railways came to revolutionise industry, is simply to say that Ireland, like other countries, has had its part, for better or for worse, in the great world-movement of nineteenth-century industry.
The figures of Irish exports and imports lend no countenance to the story of decay setting in with the Union. Taking the two decennial periods, before and after the Union, the figures are as follows:—[15]
| Total value |