mall, our population is so compact, the interests
of its component parts are so intimately fused together, that any device
at all resembling Home Rule would seem at the best cumbersome, costly,
and ineffective; at the worst, perilous to the rights of minorities, the
peace of the country, and the unity of the Kingdom. If, then, these
common-sense considerations are thrust on one side by so many
well-meaning persons, it must surely be because they think that for the
destruction of our existing system there is to be found a compelling
justification in the history of the past:

I am well aware that many of the persons of whom I am thinking profess
to base their approval of Home Rule on purely administrative grounds.
The Parliament of the United Kingdom, they say, is overweighted; it has
more to do than it can manage; we must diminish its excessive burdens;
and we can only do so by throwing them in part upon other and
subordinate assemblies. But this, if it be a reason at all, is certainly
a most insufficient one. Would any human being, anxious merely to give
relief to the House of Commons, adopt so illogical a scheme as one which
involves a provincial Parliament in Ireland, and no provincial
Parliaments anywhere else; which puts Ireland under two Parliaments, and
left the rest of the country under one; which, if Irishmen are to be
admitted to the Imperial Parliament, would give Ireland privileges and
powers denied to England and Scotland, and, if they are to be excluded
from the Imperial Parliament, would deprive Ireland of rights which
surely she ought to possess?

Again, if the "administrative" argument was really more than an ornament
of debate, would any one select Ireland as the administrative district
in which to make trial of the new system? Would any one, in his desire
to relieve the Imperial Parliament of some of its functions, select as
an area of self-government a region where one part is divided against
another by passions, and, if you will, by prejudices, more violent, and
more deeply-rooted than those which afflict any other fraction of the
United Kingdom, choose that other fraction where, and how, you will?

I take it, then, as certain that in the mind of the ordinary British
Home Ruler the justification for Home Rule is not administrative but
historical. He pictures Ireland before the English invasion as an
organised and independent State, happy in the possession of a native
polity which Englishmen have ru