tendency to unify
is sound; do not let us react to devolution." Let them, in other words,
confine their argument to the domain of political science. What, I
submit, they should refrain from, is the imputation of sordid motives to
Nationalist leaders, the prognostications of religious and racial
tyranny in Ireland, and all those inflammatory arguments against the
principle of Home Rule which have been used all the world over, from
time immemorial, for the maintenance of Unions based on legal, not on
moral, ties, which were used against responsible government for the
Transvaal, and which, I venture to affirm, degrade our public life.

I am assuming for the moment that most Conservatives will elect to use
the South African parallel in the way that Mr. Long and Lord Selborne
have used it, that is, while tacitly approving in retrospect of the Home
Rule of 1906, to argue from Union to Union. But it is of no use to blink
the fact that there are pessimists who will put forward an antithetical
case, boldly declaring that we were wrong ever to trust the Boers, that
racialism is as bad as ever, that General Botha's loyalty is cant, the
Cullinan diamond an insult, and that South Africa will go from bad to
worse under a Dutch tyranny. Party propaganda is quite elastic enough to
permit the two opposite views to be used to convince the same electorate
at the same election. Pessimists are always active in these affairs, and
they can always produce something in the nature of a plausible case,
because it stands to reason that the evils of generations cannot be
swept away in a moment, either in South Africa or Ireland. Miracles do
not happen, and the pessimists, who are the curse of Ireland to-day,
will be able to demonstrate with ease that the free Ireland of to-morrow
will not enter instantaneously upon a millennium. It is useless to
attempt to convert these extremists. For a century back, Hansard and the
columns of daily papers have been full of their unfulfilled jeremiads
about Canada, about Australia, and about the very smallest and most
tardy attempts to give a little responsibility to the majority of
citizens in Ireland. The vocabulary of impending ruin has been exhausted
long ago; there is nothing new to be said. But those who care to study
in a cool temper the course of recent South African politics in the
columns of the _Times_, or, better still, in those of that excellent
magazine for the discussion of Imperial affairs, the _Ro