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.