ed to be broken, and even its turbulent activity repressed. As it slowly revived, the Protestant antipathies of the English Government seem to have been reinforced or replaced by a more extended and still more unworthy National Jealousy-first on the subject of trade, and then on that of political rights:-and since a more enlightened view of her own interests, aided by the arms of the volunteers of 1780, have put down these causes of oppression,-the system of misgovernment has been maintained, for little other end, that we can discern, but to keep a small junto of arrogant individuals in power, and to preserve the supremacy of a faction, long after the actual cessation of the causes that lifted them into authority.

This is the abstract and brief chronicle' of the political or external history of the sister island. But it has been complicated of late, and all its symptoms aggravated by the singularity of its economical relations. The marvellous multiplication of its people, and the growing difficulty of supplying them with food or employment, presenting, at the present moment, a new and most urgent cause of dissatisfaction and alarm. For this last class of evils, a mere change in the policy of the Government would indeed furnish no remedy: and to find one in any degree available, might well task the ingenuity of the most enlightened and beneficent. But for the greater part of her past sufferings, as well as her actual degradation, disunion, and most dangerous discontent, it is impossible to deny that Government is justly responsible. Without pretending to enumerate, or even to class, the several charges which might be brought against it, or to determine what weight should be allowed to the temptations or provocations by which they might be palliated, we think it easier and far more important to remark, that the only secure preventive would have been an early, an equal, and complete incorporating Union of the two countries-and that the only effective cure for the misery occasioned by its having been so long delayed, is to labour, heartily and in earnest, still to render it equal and complete. It is in vain to hope that a provincial government should not be oppressive-that a delegated power should not be abused-that of two separate countries, allied only, but not incorporated, the weaker should not be degraded, and the stronger unjust. The only remedy is to identify and amalgamate them throughout-to mix up the oppressors and the oppressed-to take away all privileges and distinctions by fully communicating them, and to render abuses impossible, by confounding their victims with their authors.

If any one doubts of the wretchedness of an unequal and unincorporating alliance, of the degradation of being subject to a

provincial parliament and a distant king, and of the efficacy of a substantial union in curing all these evils, he is invited to look to the obvious example of Scotland. When the crowns only were united, and the governments continued separate, the weaker country was the scene of the most atrocious cruelties, the most violent injustice, the most degrading oppressions. The prevailing religion of the people was proscribed and persecuted with a ferocity greater than has ever been systematically exercised, even in Ireland; her industry was crippled and depressed by unjust and intolerable restrictions, her parliaments corrupted and overawed into the degraded instruments of a distant court, and her nobility and gentry, cut off from all hope of distinction by vindicating the rights, or promoting the interests of their country at home, were led to look up to the favour of her oppressors as the only remaining avenue to power, and degenerated, for the most part, into a band of mercenary adventurers, the more considerable aspiring to the wretched honour of executing the orders which were dictated from the South, and the rest acquiring gradually those habits of subserviency and selfish submission, the traces of which are by some supposed to be yet discernible in their descendants. The Revolution, which rested almost entirely on the prevailing antipathy to Popery, required, of course, the co-operation of all classes of Protestants; and by its success, the Scottish Presbyterians were relieved, for a time, from their Episcopalian persecution. But it was not till after the Union that the nation was truly emancipated, or lifted up from the abject condition of a dependant, at once suspected and despised. The effects of that happy consolidation were not indeed immediately apparent; for the vices which had been generated by a century of provincial misgovernment, the meannesses that had become habitual, the animosities that had so long been fostered, could not be cured at once, by the mere removal of their cause. The generation they had degraded, must first be allowed to die out—and more, perhaps, than one generation: But the poison tree was cut down-the fountain of bitter waters was sealed up, and symptoms of returning vigour and happiness were perceived. Vestiges may still be traced, perhaps, of our long degradation; but for forty years back, the provinces of Scotland have been, on the whole, but the Northern provinces of Great Britain. There are no local oppressions, no national animosities. Life, and liberty, and property, are as secure in Caithness as they are in Middlesex-industry as much encouraged, and wealth still more rapidly progressive; while not only different religious opinions, but different religious establishments, subsist in the two ends of the same island in unbroken harmony, and only

excite each other, by a friendly emulation, to greater purity of life and greater zeal for Christianity.

If this happy Union, however, had been delayed for another century-if Scotland had been doomed to submit for a hundred years more to the provincial tyranny of the Lauderdales, Rotheses, and Middletons, and to meet the cruel persecutions which gratified the ferocity of her Dalzells and Drummonds, and tarnished the glories of such men as Montrose and Dundee, with her armed conventicles and covenanted saints militant-to see her patriots exiled, or bleeding on the scaffold-her teachers silenced in her churches and schools, and her Courts of Justice degraded or overawed into the instruments of a cowardly oppression, can any man doubt, not only that she would have presented, at this day, a scene of even greater misery and discord than Ireland did in 1800; but that the corruptions and animosities by which she had been desolated would have been found to have struck so deep root as still to encumber the land, long after their seed had ceased to be scattered abroad on its surface, and only to hold out the hope of their eradication after many years of patient and painful exertion?

Such, however, is truly the condition of Ireland; and such are the grounds, and such the aspect of our hopes for her regeneration. So far from tracing any substantive part of her miseries to the Union of 1800, we think they are to be ascribed mainly to its long delay, and its ultimate incompleteness. It is not by a dissolution of the Union with England that any good can be done, but by its improvement and consolidation. Some little injury it may have produced to the shopkeepers of Dublin, and some inconsiderable increase in the number of the absentees. But it has shut up the main fountain of corruption and dishonour, and palsied the arm and broken the heart of local insolence and oppression. It has substituted, at least potentially and in prospect, the wisdom and honour of the British Government and the British people, to the passions and sordid interests of a junto of Irish borough-mongers,-and not only enabled, but compelled, all parties to appeal directly to the great tribunal of the British public. While the countries remained apart, the actual depositaries of power were almost unavoidably relied on by the general government for information, and employed as the delegates of its authority-and, as unavoidably, abused the trust, and misled and imposed on their employers. Having come into power at the time when the Catholic party, by its support of the House of Stuart, had excited against it all the fears and antipathies of the friends of liberty, they felt that they could only maintain themselves in possession of it, by keeping up that distrust and

animosity after its causes had expired. They contrived, therefore, by false representations and unjust laws, to foster these prejudices, which would otherwise have speedily disappeared—and, unluckily, succeeded but too well. As their own comparative numbers and natural consequence diminished, they clung still closer to their artificial holds on authority; and, exasperated by feeling their dignity endangered by the growing wealth, population, and intelligence of the country at large, they redoubled their efforts, by clamour and activity, intimidation and deceit, to preserve the unnatural advantages they had accidentally gained, and to keep down that springtide of general reason and substantial power which they left rising and swelling all around them. Their pretence was, that they were the champions of the Protestant Ascendency-and that whenever that was endangered, there was an end of the English connexion. While the alliance of the two countries was indeed no more than a connexion, there might be some truth in the assertion—or at least it was easy for an Irish Parliament to make it appear to be true. But the moment they came to be incorporated, its falsehood and absurdity should at once have become apparent. Unluckily, however, the incorporation was not so complete, the union so entire, as it should have been. There still was need, or was thought to be need, of a provincial management, a domestic government of Ireland;— and the old wretched parliamentary machinery, though broken up and disabled for its original work, naturally supplied the materials for its construction. The men still survived who had long been the exclusive channels of communication with the supreme government; and though other and wider channels were now opened, the habit of employing them, aided by the eagerness with which they sought for continued employment, left with them an undue share of its support. Still more unluckily, the ancient practice of misgovernment had left its usual traces on the character, not only of its authors, but its victims. Habitual oppression had produced habitual disaffection; and a long course of wrong and contumely, had ended in a desperate indignation, and an eager thirst for revenge.

The natural and necessary consequences of the Union did not, therefore, immediately follow its enactment-and are likely indeed to be longer obstructed, and run greater hazard of being fatally intercepted, than in the case of Scotland. Not only is the mutual exasperation greater, and the wounds more deeply rankled, but the Union itself is more incomplete, and leaves greater room for complaints of inequality and unfairness. The numerical strength, too, of the people is far greater, and their causes of discontent more uniform, than they ever were in Scotland; and,

above all, the temper of the race is infinitely more eager, sanguine, and reckless of consequences, than that of the sober and calculating tribes of the north. The greatest and most urgent hazard, therefore, is that which arises from their impatience;-and this unhappily is such, that unless some carly measure of conciliation is adopted, it can scarcely be any longer considered as a matter of doubt, that upon the first occasion of a war with any of the great powers of Europe, or America, the great body of the nation would rise in final and implacable hostility, and endeavour to throw off all connexion with, or dependence on Great Britain, and to erect itself into an independent state. To us it certainly appears that this would be a most desperate, wild, and impracticable enterprise. But it is not upon this account the less likely to be attempted by such a nation as the Irish—and it cannot be dissembled that the mere attempt would almost unavoidably plunge both countries in the most frightful and interminable ruin. Though the separation even of distant and mature dependencies is almost always attended with terrible convulsions, separation, in such circumstances, is unquestionably an ultimate good;-and if Ireland were a mere dependency, and were distant enough and strong enough to subsist and flourish as an independent community, we might console ourselves, even for the infinite misery of the struggle attending on the separation, by the prospect of the great increase of happiness that might be the final result. But it is impossible, we think, for any one but an exasperated, unthinking, impetuous Irishman, not to see and feel that this neither is, nor ever can be, the condition of Ireland. Peopled by the same race, speaking the same language, associated in the same pursuits, bound together and amalgamated by continual intermarriages, joint adventures in trade, and every sort of social relation, and, above all, lying within sight and reach of each other's shores, they are in truth as intimately and inseparably connected as most of the internal provinces of each are with one another; and we might as well expect to see two independent kingdoms established in friendly neighbourhood in Yorkshire and Lancashire, as to witness a similar spectacle on the two sides of the Irish Channel. Two such countries, if of equal strength, and not exasperated by previous contentions, never could maintain the relations of peace and amity with each other, as separate and independent states;-but must either mingle into one-or desolate each other in fierce and exterminating hostility, till one sinks in total exhaustion at the feet of the bleeding and exhausted victor. In the actual circumstances of the two countries, however, the attempt would be attended with still more deplorable consequences. Ireland, with whom alone