A true Union was not even attempted. The Government of Ireland, in effect, and for the most part in form, was still that of a conquered Colonial Dependency. It was no more representative in any practical sense after the Union than before the Union. The popular vote was submerged in a hostile assembly far away. The Irish peerage was regarded rightly by the Irish people as the very symbol of their own degradation, the Union having been purchased with titles, and titles having been for a century past the price paid for the servility of Anglo-Irish statesmen. But the peerage, in the persons of the twenty-eight representatives sent to Westminster, still remained a powerful nucleus of anti-Irish opinion, infecting the House of Lords with anti-Irish prejudice, and often opposing a last barrier to reform when the opposition of the British House of Commons had been painfully overcome. In truth the cardinal reforms of the nineteenth century were obtained, not by persuasion, but by unconstitutional violence in Ireland itself. There was still a separate Executive in Ireland, a separate system of local administration, and until 1817 a separate financial system, all of them wholly outside Irish control. The only change of constitutional importance was that the Viceroy gradually became a figure-head, and his autocratic powers, similar to those of the Governor of a Crown Colony, were transferred to the Chief Secretary, who was a member of the British Ministry. Gradually, as the activity of Government increased, there grew up that grotesque system of nominated and irresponsible Boards which at the present day is the laughing-stock of the civilized world. The whole patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in English hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways frankly corrupt, it was manipulated in a fashion just as deleterious to Ireland. Before, as after, the Union there was no public career in Ireland for an Irishman who was in sympathy with the great majority of his countrymen. To win the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly, by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. Locker-Lampson puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument of her humiliation. The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as before, it was the principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest