"We know our duty to our Sovereign, and are loyal: we also know our duty to ourselves, and are resolved to be free."-Declaration of Dungannon Volunteers, 1782. "You may make the Union binding as a law, but you can never make it obligatory on conscience. It will be obeyed as long as England is strong; but resistance to it will be in the abstract a duty, and the exhibition of that resistance will be merely a question of prudence."-RIGHT HON. WILLIAM SAURIN. "Union is Irish alienation."-RIGHT HON. HENRY GRATTAN. "Union is not unity. Heterogeneous and repugnant things may be arbitrarily tied together, but this is not unity. Closer contact elicits the repugnances which rend all external bonds asunder."-CARDINAL MANNING. "Independence sends life through all the veins of a nation."-GOLDWIN SMITH. TO WHICH A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER IS ADDED, LONDON: WARD AND DOWNEY, 12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1888. [All rights reserved.] PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. THE enactment of the Legislative Union in 1800 has been followed by almost incessant agitation to obtain its repeal. The desire of the Irish people to recover their right of domestic legislation is as natural as a sick man's desire for restoration to health. Ireland's vital need is Self-Government; the exclusive control and development of her own resources. "Placed," says the late Robert Holmes, "on the western skirt of Europe, with three-fourths of her shores washed by the Atlantic, after the discovery of a new world had opened to European enterprise new objects of adventure and new sources of aggrandisement, Ireland seemed destined to be an important connecting link in the intercourse between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Independent of the discovery of America, and the new field thereby opened for commercial enterprise, the situation of Ireland seemed peculiarly fitted for maritime pre-eminence. . . . Ireland, too, had before her many glorious examples of what free States, very inferior to her in extent of territory and other natural advantages, could achieve by commercial daring. The powers of independent existence seemed to be marked in her structure in such bold characters by nature, that it required the unceasing efforts of an active and malignant policy to defeat the obvious purposes of Creation." * That active and malignant policy was never more perniciously exercised than in its efforts, first to corrupt, and * "The Case of Ireland Stated." By Robert Holmes, Esq. 1847. |