further security would be thereby obtained for his own ascendancy; the liberal Protestant and the oppressed Catholic in the hope that the Union would be accompanied by a measure of emancipation. Lord Cornwallis, the successor of Lord Camden, was convinced that until the Catholics were admitted to a general participation of rights, under the protection and check of a Legislative Union, there would be no peace or safety in Ireland. Pitt was of the same opinion. "With regard to the Catholics," said Lord Lansdowne, "their emancipation was a thing which it was vain to stop. It was silly to say that we were sorry that anything was done for the Catholics; we ought to rejoice at it, and cheerfully finish what we had begun. There was nothing to fear from it. Those who thought there was, ought to look at the condition of the Pope, and the state of France; they would then see that there was no fear from any body of men on account of the religion they professed. That species of deception was gone. The question was not what religion you should have, but whether you should be permitted to have any? It was not whether this or that religion, but whether all religion should be destroyed?"[1]
On the 22nd of January 1799, a Royal Message announced the proposal for a Union to both Parliaments. In Ireland Mr. Ponsonby moved and carried a hostile amendment to the address in answer to the Speech from the throne. In the English House of Commons a similar amendment, moved by Sheridan, was negatived without a division, and after long discussion resolutions in favour of the Union were carried. On the 19th March they were discussed in the House of Lords. The correspondence which had passed between Lord Shelburne, the Duke of Portland, and Lord Rockingham in 1782 relative to the affairs of Ireland, had been recently presented to Parliament, and with the resolution of the 17th May of that year had been quoted to prove that the work then done was not regarded by the authors of it as
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xxxiv. 677.
