again, and he resumed the reins of power on the understanding that he would not bring in Catholic Emancipation during the King's lifetime, and that he would not suffer it to be carried.

There remained the two great questions of the payment of the priests and the commutation of tithes. Both of these measures had been held out to the Catholics as boons to be obtained by the Union, and Pitt had clearly recognised their importance. They were, indeed, far more really important than the admission of a few Catholic gentry to the Imperial Parliament, and they could have been carried with far less difficulty and opposition. But Pitt had gained what he wanted and moved the Catholic question out of his way, and he accordingly refused to take the smallest trouble on the subject. His ministry was now very weak. The war was again raging, and he had no wish to raise any difficult internal question. The first measure was never carried, and the tithe system was allowed to remain for a whole generation the most prolific source of crime and agitation in Ireland.

In the meantime great apprehension was felt about the attitude of the Irish Catholics. Except during the brief interval of tranquillity which followed the peace of Amiens, England was engaged in a desperate struggle with France, and Catholic disloyalty appeared proportionately terrible. Immediately upon the resignation of Pitt and the installation of a new and anti-Catholic ministry, the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, drew up and privately circulated among the Catholic leaders a paper, in which he earnestly exhorted them to patience under their disappointment, warned them against Jacobinical associations, and expatiated upon the great advantage their cause had gained in so many eminent statesmen being pledged not to take office without carrying it.

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This paper was unofficial, but, emanating as it did from the Lord Lieutenant, it had naturally great weight. It proved, however, to be one more added to the many deceptions the Irish Catholics experienced. Lord Cornwallis, who immediately after resigned his office, subsequently admitted that he had no authority for the statement that the retiring ministers were pledged to abstain from office till they could carry Catholic Emancipation.' He had merely drawn an inference though it must be admitted a very natural inference-from the situation. Whatever may have been the opinion of others, he at least believed that the communications he had made to the Catholic leaders amounted to a moral pledge. When Pitt, three weeks after his resignation, offered to abandon the Catholics, he made none of his colleagues his confidants except Dundas; but on his return to office the attitude he resolved to assume became manifest. The Catholics acted with signal moderation. They would at this time have gladly accepted emancipation accompanied by those safeguards which a few years later were so scornfully rejected. They abstained from all political agitation that might embarrass the Government; and it was only in 1805 that their leaders brought over to London a petition for emancipation, which they asked Pitt, who was then in power, to present and to support. He not only refused to do so, but even declared that he would oppose it; and, after a brilliant debate, the Catholics were defeated by an overwhelming majority through his influence. Is it surprising that O'Connell found them apt scholars when he taught them to exchange a policy of moderation for one of violent agitation?

There is great reason to believe that the enduring unpopularity of the Union was much more due to these 1 Cornwallis Correspondence, iii. 347–349.

things, and to the time and circumstances under which the measure was forced through, than to its own demerits. Many reasonable men had come to see that the Constitution of 1782 could not have lasted, and that the state of feeling which had been produced in Ireland by the events of the closing years of the eighteenth century had immensely diminished the chances of the successful working of a separate Parliament. It is probable that in quieter times a genuine movement for a Union would have arisen in Ireland, though it is also probable that it would have been for a Union on a more federal basis than that which was actually adopted.

One great evil resulting from the measure-the expense of carrying witnesses to London for the trial of contested elections and for private parliamentary business-was anticipated by Portland and Pitt, and they suggested a plan which appears to have been favourably received by the Cabinet for at least diminishing it. They proposed to enable the Chairman of Quarter Sessions or the Sheriff of the county to summon the contending parties in Ireland; to reduce their evidence to writing which was to be certified to the Speaker in London, and thus to make it possible to dispense with their actual presence in the metropolis. It was suggested that, though it would be difficult to embody the various regulations such a proceeding would require in an article of the Union, its principle might at least be stated in the Act, leaving the details to be settled by the United Parliament. Probably through a desire to avoid all unnecessary subjects of controversy this proposal was dropped, and the evil it was intended to remedy continued through the whole century. It was indeed immensely aggravated as the new powers granted to municipalities and trading corporations, and the vast enterprises in railways, telegraphs, and gas and electric lighting, growing out of

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nineteenth century inventions, multiplied the amount and the cost of Irish private business in Parliament.'

The financial part of the Union also completely broke down. The proportion which Ireland was bound to pay to Imperial taxation was pronounced by the best financial authorities in the Irish Parliament to be larger than she could bear, and they predicted that the Union would ultimately produce an amalgamation of debts and an identification of taxation which would be exceedingly injurious to the poorer country. The Irish National Debt had indeed increased with terrible rapidity during the last seven years of the eighteenth century, owing to the great French war and the rebellion, but it was still only about twenty-eight and a half millions, while the debt of Great Britain exceeded four hundred and forty-six millions, and in times of peace the taxation of Ireland was probably below that of any considerable country in Europe. It was contended in Ireland that Irish taxation would soon be raised to the English level, but this was certainly not the intention of the English ministers. The provisions for keeping the debt and the taxation of Ireland separate from those of Great Britain as long as the proportionate resources of the two countries were different were intended, in the words of Lord Castlereagh, to give Ireland 'the utmost possible security that she cannot be taxed beyond the measure of her comparative ability, and that the ratio of her contribution must ever correspond with her relative wealth and prosperity.'

No one ever stated in clearer or more impressive language than Pitt the economical truth, that identical taxation falling upon two countries differing widely in their level of

See Castlereagh Correspondence, ii. 56-57. pp. 286-287. See, too, an excellent pamphlet on by Arthur W. Samuels, Q.C. (1899).

Lord Ashbourne's Pitt,
Private Bill Procedure '

wealth must press with a special weight on the poorer country, and although the English ministers did undoubtedly contemplate a time when the taxation of the two islands should be indiscriminate, they meant this only to take place when Ireland had substantially reached the English level of prosperity. It must be evident,' Lord Castlereagh said, 'that if our manufactures keep pace in advancement for the next twenty years with the progress they have made in the last twenty years, they may, at the expiration of it, be fully able to cope with the British, and that the two kingdoms may be safely left, like any two counties of the same kingdom, to a free competition.'

Perhaps, if the French war had speedily ceased, things might have turned out differently. As it was, Ireland proved utterly incapable of paying her stipulated share. Within sixteen years she became bankrupt, and the amalgamation of debts which then took place was probably to her advantage. For a little more than half a century after the Union she enjoyed large exemptions from English taxation. English taxes on different articles and forms of industry in the first half of the nineteenth century were almost innumerable, and a large proportion of them had never been extended to Ireland. For several years after 1817 there were taxes amounting to twenty millions which were imposed on Great Britain, and from which Ireland was exempted. As late as 1845 the exemptions amounted to considerably more than fourteen millions.' But at last, and at a time when the difference between the relative wealth of the two islands was far greater than at the time of the Union, these exemptions were nearly all abolished, and the predicted assimilation of Irish to British taxation was substantially effected.

The great free trade movement also profoundly altered the relative position of the two islands. It brought imReport on the Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland (1896), p. 155.