But, after all, the Irish Peerage of to-day is to a great extent the product of the Irish Union. "There is no crime recorded in history--I do not except the Massacre of St. Bartholomew--which will compare for a moment with the means by which the Union was carried." The student of men and moods, having no clue to guide him, would probably attribute this outburst to Mr. Gladstone at some period between his first and second Home Rule Bills; and he would be right. For my own part, I can scarcely follow the allusion to St. Bartholomew, but beyond doubt the measures employed by the English Government in order to secure the Union were both cruel and base. It is the baseness with which we are just now concerned. In order to carry the Union it was necessary to persuade the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons, and to capture the whole machinery of bribery and terrorism which directed the Irish Parliament. As that blameless publicist Sir T. Erskine May tranquilly observes, "corrupt interests could only be overcome by corruption." The policy of out-corrupting the corruptest was pursued with energy and resolution. Each patron of Irish boroughs who was ready to part with them received £7500 for each seat. Lord Downshire got £52,000 for seven seats; Lord Ely £45,000 for six. The total amount paid in compensation for the surrender of electoral powers was £1,260,000. In addition to these pecuniary inducements, honours were lavishly distributed as bribes. Five Irish peers were called to the House of Lords, twenty were advanced a step in the peerage, and twenty-two new peers were created. It would be invidious, and perhaps actionable, to attach proper names to the amazing histories of Corruption by Title which are narrated in the Private Correspondence of the Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, and the published Memoirs of Sir Jonah Barrington. Even that sound loyalist Mr. Lecky was constrained to admit that "the majority of Irish titles are historically connected with memories not of honour but of shame." On the 22nd January 1799 one member of the Irish House of Commons took his bribe in the brief interval between his speech for, and his vote against a resolution affirming the right of the Irish nation to an independent Legislature. Another aspirant to the peerage "made and sang songs against the Union in 1799, and made and sang songs for it in 1800." He got his deserts. A third secured £30,000 for his surrendered boroughs, a peerage for himself, and for his brother in Holy Orders an archbishopric so wealthy that its fortunate owner became a peer, and subsequently an earl, on his own account. The scandalous tale might be indefinitely prolonged; but enough has been said to show why it is difficult to shed tears when these strangely-engendered peerages sink below the prescribed number of a hundred. IV OMITTED SILHOUETTES