Commons was almost unanimously in favour of the Union--not more than
thirty members ever voted against it; and in the opinion of Lord
Cornwallis, who throughout his long and varied career showed himself
to be a shrewd observer and an upright, honourable man, "This country
could not be saved without the Union."

But really the whole discussion is beside the mark. The Nationalists
continually repeat the charge that the Union was carried by fraud; and
so it must be answered; but it has no bearing on anything existing at
the present day. For the old Irish Parliament has disappeared--merged
in the greater and more honourable Assembly of the United Kingdom; and
to revive it now would be a physical impossibility. The whole state
of circumstances has changed; no assembly that could now be formed in
Ireland would bear the faintest resemblance to that which met in the
eighteenth century. As Lecky has well expressed it:--

"To an historian of the eighteenth century, however, few
things can be more grotesquely absurd than to suppose that the
merits or demerits, the failure or the successes of the
Irish Parliament has any real bearing on modern schemes for
reconstructing the Government of Ireland on a revolutionary
and Jacobin basis; entrusting the protection of property and
the maintenance of law to some democratic assembly consisting
mainly of Fenians and Land-leaguers, of paid agitators and
of penniless adventurers. The Parliamentary system of the
eighteenth century might be represented in very different
lights by its enemies and by its friends. Its enemies would
describe it as essentially a government carried on through the
instrumentality of a corrupt oligarchy, of a large, compact
body of members holding place and pensions at the pleasure of