ossesses no
Legislature of her own, although in theory she is supposed to possess
sufficient legislative control over Irish affairs through representation
in the Imperial Parliament. In practice, however, this control has
always been, and still remains, illusory, just as it would certainly
have proved illusory if conferred upon any Colony. It can be exercised
only by cumbrous, circuitous, and often profoundly unhealthy methods;
and over a wide range of matters it cannot by any method whatsoever be
exercised at all.

To look behind mere technicalities to the spirit of government, Ireland
resembles one of that class of Crown Colonies of which Jamaica and Malta
are examples, where the inhabitants exercise no control over
administration, and only partial control over legislation.[4]

Why is this?

Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his political
judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when opposing the first reading
of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. "Does anybody doubt,"
he said, "that if Ireland were a thousand miles away from England she
would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" Now this
was not a barren geographical truism, which might by way of hypothesis
be applied in identical terms to any fraction of the United
Kingdom--say, for example, to that part of England lying south of the
Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made any attempt to deny--no one with the
smallest knowledge of history could have denied--that Ireland, though
only sixty miles away from England, was less like England than any of
the self-governing Colonies then attached to the Crown, possessing
distinct national characteristics which entitled her, in theory at any
rate, to demand, not merely colonial, but national autonomy. On the
contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of his way to argue, with all the
force and fire of an accomplished debater, that the Bill was a highly
dangerous measure precisely because, while granting Ireland a measure of
autonomy, it denied her some of the elementary powers, not only of
colonial, but of national States; for instance, the full control over
taxation, which all self-governing Colonies possessed, and the control
over foreign policy, which is a national attribute. The complementary
step in his argument was that, although nominally withheld by statute,
these fuller powers would be forcibly usurped by the future Irish
Government through the leverage offered by a subordinat