The Union, Pitt said, was no proposal to subject Ireland to a foreign yoke, but a voluntary association of two great countries seeking their common benefit in one empire. There were progresses of the viceroy, visits of political agents, military warnings, threats of eviction, to induce petitions in its favour; all reforms were refused--the outrageous system of collecting tithes, the disabilities of Catholics--so as to keep something to bargain with; 137,000 armed men were assembled in Ireland. But amid the universal detestation and execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and proceeded to pack the parliament privately. By official means the Commons were purged of sixty-three opponents, and safe men put in, some Englishmen, some staff-officers, men without a foot of land in Ireland. There were, contrary to one of the new laws, seventy-two place-holders and pensioners in the House. Fifty-four peerages were given to buy consciences. The borough-holders were offered 1-¼ millions to console them for loss in sale of seats. There was a host of minor pensions. Threats and disgrace were used to others. Large sums were sent from London to bribe the Press, and corrupt the wavering with ready money. Pitt pledged himself to emancipation. Thus in 1800, at the point of the sword, and amid many adjurations to speed from England, the Act of Union was forced through the most corrupt parliament ever created by a government: it was said that only seven of the majority were unbribed. An Act "formed in the British cabinet, unsolicited by the Irish nation," "passed in the middle of war, in the centre of a tremendous military force, under the influence of immediate personal danger," was followed, as wise men had warned, by generations of strife. A hundred years of ceaseless agitation, from the first tragedy of Robert Emmet's abortive rising in 1803, proclaimed the undying opposition of Irishmen to a Union that from the first lacked all moral sanction. An English parliament, all intermediate power being destroyed, was now confronted with the Irish people. Of that people it knew nothing, of its national spirit, its conception of government or social life. The history and literature which might reveal the mind of the nation is so neglected that to this day there is no means for its study in the Imperial University, nor the capital of Empire. The _Times_ perceived in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general confederacy in crime ... a settled and uniform system of guilt, accompanied by horrible and monstrous perjuries such as could not be found in any civilised country."