nt, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old
as the human race itself. Of all human passions, that for political
domination is the last to yield to reason. Men are naturally inclined to
attribute admitted social evils to every cause--religion, climate, race,
congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine
Providence--rather than to the form of political institutions; in other
words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the
security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty
of its component parts. If, in one case, their own experience proves
them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in
misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable
pretext for distinguishing the case from its predecessor. Underlying all
is a nervous terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption
that men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under the
demoralizing influence of coercion. The British Empire has grown, and
continues to grow, in spite of this deeply rooted political doctrine.
Ireland is peculiar only in that her proximity to the seat of power has
exposed her for centuries to an application of the doctrine in its most
extreme form and without any hope of escape through the merciful
accidents to which more fortunate communities owe their emancipation.
Canada owes her position in the Empire, and the Empire itself exists in
its present form to-day, owing to the accident that the transcendantly
important principle of responsible government advocated by Lord Durham
as a remedy for the anarchy and stagnation in which he found both the
British and the French Provinces of Canada in 1838, did not require
Imperial legislation, and was established without the Parliamentary or
electoral sanction of Great Britain. Lord Durham was derided as a
visionary, and abused as unpatriotic for the assertion of this simple
principle. Far in advance of his time as he was, he himself shrank from
the full application of his own lofty ideal, and consequently made one
great, though under the circumstances not a capital, mistake in his
diagnosis, and it was to that mistake only that Parliament gave
legislative effect in 1840. By one of the most melancholy ironies in all
history Ireland was the source of his error, so that the Union of the
Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians themselves in 1867, was
actually based on the success of