When the contest had begun, Gladstone’s pugnacity broke all bounds. He appealed to separatist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, as well as in Ireland. He appealed to the “masses” against the “classes.” He appealed to ignorance against intelligence and the professions. One of the most eminent of his lifelong friends and admirers, who had held high office in his Government, said of him in a letter to me, “Gladstone is morally insane.” He had lost the personal influences by which his impulses had been controlled. Graham, Newcastle, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, all were gone. Cardwell especially, a man eminently sure-footed and cool-headed, had, I suspect, while he lived, exercised an important and salutary though unfelt restraint. Carried away by his excitement, Gladstone traduced the authors of the Union and their work, a work which he had once coupled with the treaty of commerce with France as supremely honourable to Pitt. “A horrible and shameful history, for no epithets weaker than these can in the slightest degree describe or indicate ever so faintly the means by which, in defiance of the national sentiment of Ireland, consent to the Union was attained.” Such is his language, and he compares the transaction in atrocity to the worst crimes in history. Consent to the Union was attained by the absolute necessity, plain to men of sense, of putting an end to murderous anarchy and averting a renewal of ’98. It has been clearly shown that there was no serious bribery of a pecuniary kind. The indemnities for the owners of pocket boroughs were paid, in accordance with the notions of the day and under an Act of Parliament, alike to those who had voted for the Union and to those who had voted against it. The oligarchy to whose local reign the measure put an end was appeased with peerages and appointments, the scramble for which might well disgust a high-minded man like Cornwallis. This was probably inevitable in those days. Satisfactorily to obtain the national consent was impossible. The Parliament was a Protestant oligarchy, the Catholics being still excluded, and it was deeply stained with the atrocities of repression. Ireland, in fact, was not a nation, or capable of giving a national consent; it was a country divided between two races antagonistic in religion and at deadly enmity with each other. The submission of the question to the constituencies by the holding of a general election, five-sixths of the population being excluded from Parliament, would have been futile, and would very likely have revived the civil war. Pitt, it is true, held out to the Catholics a hope of political emancipation. That hope he did his best to fulfil, but he was prevented by the fatuous obstinacy of the King; and Mr. Gladstone, who was a devout monarchist, might have been challenged to say what, when met by the Royal veto, Pitt could have done. The promise remained in abeyance for one generation, at the end of which it was fulfilled. These bitter appeals to Irish hatred