Pitt now prepared an important measure, that he had been considering for many years. The growing disorders in Ireland convinced him of the necessity of a legislative and parliamentary union between the two countries. On the 31st of January, 1799, he proposed his bill; already badly received by the Irish Parliament. The royal prerogative for the creation of Irish peers was not limited, as it became in the definitive bill. By a clever rotation of elections in the boroughs, none of them completely lost their franchise. The number of the Irish representatives in the House of Commons was fixed at one hundred. The speech of the prime minister was one of the most eloquent ever made. Three times only, in the course of his life, did he consent to revise his addresses; the speech on the union with Ireland, was one that had that honor. In it he declared that England was engaged in a struggle the most important and solemn that had ever been seen in the history of the world; in a struggle where Great Britain alone ought to resist resolutely and with success, the common enemy of civilized society. {382} They saw, he said, the point upon which the enemy believed them assailable; and should not prudence compel them to fortify that vulnerable point, engaged, as they were, in the struggle of liberty against despotism, of property against rapine and pillage, of religion and order against impiety and anarchy? And, on the other hand, if a country should be unable to defend itself against the greatest of all dangers which might threaten its peace and security, without the assistance of another nation, and that nation should be a neighbor and an ally, if she spoke the same language, if her laws, her customs, and her habits were the same in principle; if the commerce of that nation was more extended, and its means of acquiring and spreading abroad riches were more numerous; if that nation possessed a government, whose stability and admirable constitution excited more than ever the admiration of Europe, while the country in question possessed only an incomplete and imperfect imitation of that constitution; what, in such a case, would be the conduct demanded by all motives of equity, interest, and honor? "I ask you," said he, in conclusion, "if this is not a faithful exposition of the motives which ought to lead Ireland to desire union? I ask you, if Great Britain is not precisely the nation to which a country in the situation of Ireland, ought to desire to unite itself? Could a union contracted under such circumstances, with a free consent, and under equitable conditions, merit to be stigmatized as the submission of Ireland to a foreign yoke?" [Image] The Battle Of Aboukir. {383}