These few firm bits of fact are those provided by history and geography. Open the map and look at the situation of Great Britain and of Ireland relatively to each other; observe how they lie near, yet apart; how they are separated by intervening seas, but seas so narrow as to be a bond quite as much as a bar; how they are inhabited by races speaking the same language but professing different religions; and bear in mind that these are the features of the picture which cannot be altered. This being so, let us next suppose that some stranger ignorant of all the trivial details of the Irish question, on his arrival amongst us, were asked to state what, in his opinion, with the above conditions placed before him, the institutions of two such islands relatively to one another were likely to be, judging from his experience of other countries. Would he not probably reply that the wise statesmen of Great Britain, of whose fame he had heard in foreign lands, had doubtless long ago come to the conclusion that their separation for some purposes, and their union for others, was stamped on the map as the certain and inevitable condition of any satisfactory settlement of their mutual relations, and that, alike to their complete separation and to their complete union, there was one and the same answer: _Opposuit natura_. But, further, let us suppose him in his turn to inquire what the experience of the past had been in this particular case; and whether the two countries at the present time were entirely united or entirely separate, or were linked by some intermediate arrangement adapted to their relative needs and springing out of them; and suppose that the answer was, as it would have to be, that after several centuries of aggravated strife, they had first tried entire legislative separation, and had then abandoned it for an absolute incorporate union. Would he in that case be astonished if he was informed that history had vindicated geography, and that under neither of these two relations had peace, goodwill, and amity, been the distinguishing characteristics of the relations of Great Britain and Ireland? To such a traveller it might perhaps be explained as an unexampled portent, that although constitutional liberty, limited only by the right of every Government to suppress crime and repress disorder, had been extended by the larger to the smaller country; that although an equal representation, a wide suffrage and vote by ballot had also been given, and no alien Church any longer vexed the conscientious scruples of the majority, and the land system of the country had also been reformed, yet so unreasonable were the minds of the Irish people that they refused to be contented, and were now asking for a modification of the fundamental articles of the existing incorporate union, and that a constant agitation in consequence prevailed.