uld be Great
Britain's interest to encourage her to secede and assume the position of
a small State like Belgium, whose independence in our own interests we
guarantee. Since nobody of sense, in or out of Ireland supposes that her
interest lies in that direction, we need not consider the point; but it
is just as well to bear in mind that a prosperous and friendly neighbour
on a footing of independence is better than a discontented and backward
neighbour on a footing of dependence. The corollary is this--that any
restrictions or limitations upon the subordinate Irish Government and
Parliament which are not scientifically designed to secure the easy
working of the whole Imperial machinery, but are the outcome of
suspicion and distrust, will serve only to aggravate existing evils.
When the supreme object of a Home Rule measure is to create a sense of
responsibility in the people to whom it is extended, what could be more
perversely unwise than to accompany the gift with a declaration of the
incompetence of the people to exercise responsibility, and with
restraints designed to prevent them from proving the contrary?

Centuries of experience have not yet secured general acceptation for
this simple principle. In this domain of thought the tenacity of error
is marvellous, even if we make full allowance for the disturbing effect
on men's minds of India and other coloured dependencies where despotic,
or semi-despotic, systems are in vogue. Since the expansion of England
began in the seventeenth century, it cannot be said that the principle
of trusting white races to manage their own affairs has ever received
the express and conscious sanction of a united British people. It has
been repeatedly repudiated by Governments in the most categorical terms,
and repudiated sometimes to the point of bloodshed. In other cases it
has met with lazy retrospective acquiescence on the discovery that
powers surreptitiously obtained or granted without formal legislation
had not been abused. The Australian Acts of 1850 and 1855 were the first
approach to a spontaneous application of the full principle; but even
then many statesmen were not fully alive to the consequences of their
action, while there was no public interest, and very little
Parliamentary interest, in the fate of these remote dependencies. The
fully developed modern doctrine of comradeship with the great
self-governing Dominions, a doctrine which we may date from the
accession of Mr. C