Ireland, many points of interest have been necessarily omitted; but what
has been said will suffice to show how baseless is the assertion, so
frequently urged as an argument for Home Rule, that the Imperial
Parliament is incapable of legislating successfully for Irish wants.[72]
Nothing could be more futile than to represent Irish problems, and
especially the problems of Irish rural life, as so unique that only a
Parliament sitting in Dublin can hope to solve them satisfactorily. As a
matter of fact, the rural question in Ireland is, in most of its
essential features, very similar to the rural question in other
countries, of which Denmark is perhaps the best example; and the
methods which have been successful there are already proving successful
here. Single ownership of the land by the cultivator; State aid,
encouraging and supplemementing co-operation and self-help; co-operation
and self-help providing suitable opportunities for the fruitful
application of State aid--these are the principles by which Unionist
legislation for Ireland has been guided, and they are the principles
which any wise legislation must follow, whether it emanate from an Irish
or from the Imperial Parliament. Indeed, if there is anything "unique"
in the Irish case, it is the deep division of sentiment inherited from
the unhappy history of the country and reinforced by those differences
of race and creed to which I have already alluded as making two Irelands
out of one. But the remedy for this is not to cut Ireland adrift and
leave the two sections to fight it out alone, but rather to maintain the
existing constitution as the best guarantee that the balance will be
held even between them.

Sir Horace Plunkett has well summed up the real needs of rural Ireland
in the formula "better farming, better business, better living." He has
himself done more than any other single man to bring the desired
improvement about. I am not ashamed to acknowledge myself his disciple,
and in the measures for which I was responsible during my time in
Ireland, I ever kept the practical objects for which he has striven
steadily in view. In a speech which I made shortly after taking office I
used the phrase "killing Home Rule with kindness." This phrase has been
repeatedly quoted since, as if it had been a formal declaration on the
part of the incoming Irish Government that to "kill Home Rule" was the
Alpha and the Omega of their policy. What I really said was that we
in