Britain and Ireland shall upon the first day of January which shall be in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and one be and for ever be united as one Kingdom.

ARTICLE II.-That the succession to the Crown shall continue as at present.

ARTICLE III.-That there shall be onė Parliament for the United Kingdom.

ARTICLE IV. That Ireland's proportion of the Imperial Parliament shall consist of 4 Peers spiritual and 28 Peers temporal in the Imperial House of Lords, and of 100 members in the Imperial House of Commons. Irish Peers not members of the Imperial House of Lords may sit in the Lower Chamber as representatives of English constituencies.

ARTICLE V. That the Churches of England and Ireland be united into one Protestant Episcopal Church, to be called the United Church of England and Ireland.

ARTICLE VI.-(1) That the King's subjects in Great Britain and Ireland shall be on the same footing as to bounties and encouragements on the same articles, and generally in respect to trade and navigation, and in all treaties with foreign powers shall have the same privileges.

(2) That no duty shall be charged on the export of articles from one country into the other, save only upon certain excepted articles mentioned

in the schedule, which shall be subject to none but countervailing duties for a period of twenty years. But the existing duty on woollen manufactures is to continue the same, and it is provided that salt, hops, and coals, on their importation from England into Ireland, are not to be subject to burthens exceeding the present.

If we now turn to the schedules we see revealed at a glance the vast grinding and all-pervasive tyranny exercised by the rulers of both countries upon the ruled, of the consumers upon the makers, the eaters upon the producers. Untaxed themselves, the men who hold the land and fill the Parliaments and flourish the King's name, now as a whip to chastise, now as a sacred symbol to overawe, have with lynx eyes peered through and through the varied domain of industry and upon every exercise of human ingenuity or human toil, exact their share and lay what the Act happily calls burthens. "As if industry were some wild beast of the chase for the mighty hunters of the earth to pursue," slay, and flay. For the King is no more, and the People is not yet, and we are sovereign and irresponsible, and all that man makes we will tax, dropping at times a decorous tear as we take our share, as if driven thereto by a sad, inflexible necessity and terming it a "burthen." There in the schedules lies the long strange list of the things taxed by our Parliaments, English and Irish, over

and above the great rent-tax. Beer, bricks, and tiles, candles, chocolate, and soap, cyder, glass, perry, and hops. On leather especially how severe are we and how knowing:-leather dressed and undressed, goatskin, sheepskin, and lambskin, skin of horses, skin of mares, and to stop a hole through which acute rascals might escape, the skin of geldings, and however "tawed," and whether with salt, alum, or mead. Even the pelt of the felis domesticus is caught and taxed in an all and sundry provision. The mighty hunters of the earth must get their cut, too, from the skin of puss. Mead, and metheglin-query, do they differ?-all papers, and whether white or brown or whited-brown, except "elephant" and cartridge papers for war, for we are now very warlike, fighting those who late hunted our brethren, the hunting chivalry of Gaul, 21d. the pound, and for every pound weight of books 2d., for indeed we are not very discriminating in literature nor very friendly to the same (books at the best seem to suggest a Jacobin strain), and all wall-papers, stained or unstained. Calicoes stained

we spell the word with two ls-7d. yer yard over and above the duties payable on the unstained article; muslins, linen stuffs, silk, Irish salt 10s. the bushel, ribbons!-even our handmaidens must pay us if they will be gay. Silk stuffs, two-thirds of the weight, and one-third of the weight of crape, with a gracious reduction for gum and dress, taxed

elsewhere. And the silk ribbons and stockings, the gloves and fringe-lacing, and silk thread, all and sundry, and those mixed with inkle (?) and cotton. How the stern old Hebrew who watched askance the daughters of Zion as they went bravely would have been delighted to see this day had certain other sights been denied him. Spirits, of course, but as yet only 5s. 1d. the gallon, verjuice and vinegar, wines of all sorts, sweets, not confectionery but such drinkables as Mrs. Primrose made from garden produce, but sweets too, and boys' delight, sugar-candy. From the little child's stick of toffee the lords and gentlemen of England break off not a small bit, and say this is ours. But enough, for I am only at the commencement of the list. Suffice it to say that in those days industry was well hunted. It was not caught in pitfalls by stealth and slain covertly under the shadow of night, as there are who assert is the manner now, but hunted openly and cheerily with the sound of the horn, and all the world looking on. The Article in the Act of Union which refers to countervailing duties meant merely this: We English Nimrods having slain and flayed our beasts according to forest law and usage of venerie, you Irish Nimrods must not harry what we suffer to escape, but leave them to breed for the next season, we English Nimrods undertaking to observe the same law by you like honourable brother sportsmen.

ARTICLE VII.-(1) Charges for debts incurred by either Kingdom before the Act of Union to be separately defrayed.

(2) For twenty years the proportion supplied by Ireland to the expenditure of the Empire shall be as 15 to 2, or two-seventeenths of the whole, and after that lapse of time as Parliament shall determine, upon due comparison of the exports and imports of the two countries, or their respective consumption of spirits, sugar, beer, wine, tea, and tobacco, or both comparisons taken together, or on a comparison of the respective incomes of each nation, the proportion to be revised by Parliament every twenty years at the outside, and not less than seven. But these provisions to be nugatory and void in case Parliament shall lay equal duties on the same articles.

The revenues of Ireland to form a consolidated fund for annual payment of the interest on her own National Debt.

It is also provided that when the Irish National Debt amounts to two-seventeenths of the Imperial Debt the two shall merge.

The Irish Debt is as yet comparatively a germ, but one with plenty of vitality. An Irish Parliament, too, like the Imperial, has had little scruple about rolling over responsibilities and charging debts upon the unborn, though the loan-jobbers for a long time looked askance upon their promises