The Framework of Home Rule | Page 2

common to writers of all shades of political opinion is now
astonishingly large. The result, I think, is due mainly to the good
influence of that eminent historian and Unionist politician, the late
Professor Lecky. Indeed, an advocate of Home Rule, nervously
suspicious of tainted material, could afford to rely solely on his
"History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public
Opinion in Ireland," and "Clerical Influences,"[1] which are Nationalist
textbooks, and, for quite recent events, on "A Consideration of Ireland
in the Nineteenth Century," by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present
Unionist Member for Salisbury. A strange circumstance; but Ireland,
like all countries where political development has been forcibly
arrested from without, is a land of unending paradox. It is only one of
innumerable anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist
histories as propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish
Unionists should insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those
which in any normal country would long ago have been consigned by
general consent to oblivion and the institutions they embody
overthrown; and that Unionist writers such as those I have mentioned
should be able to reconcile their history and their politics only by a
pessimism with regard to the tendencies of human nature in general, or
of Irish nature in particular, with which their own historical teaching,
founded on a true perception of cause and effect, appears to be in direct
contradiction.
The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the
verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare
affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a
question without a knowledge of how human beings have been
accustomed to act under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort
Irish history and the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need.

The modern case for the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of
Ireland, and that is precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet.
For Ireland in many ways is painfully abnormal. The most cursory
study of her institutions and social, economic, and political life
demonstrate that fact. The Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the
secondary peculiarities, and ignoring their fundamental cause,
demonstrates it with ease, and by a habit of mind which yields only
with infinite slowness to the growth of political enlightenment, passes
instinctively to the deduction that Irish abnormalities render Ireland
unfit for self-government. In other words, he prescribes for the disease
a persistent application of the very treatment which has engendered it.
Whatever the result, there is a plausible answer. If Ireland is disorderly
and retrograde, how can she deserve freedom? If she is peaceful, and
shows symptoms of economic recuperation, clearly she does not need
or even want it. In other words, if all that is healthy in the patient
battles desperately and not in vain, first against irritant poison, and then
against soporific drugs, this healthy struggle for self-preservation is
attributed not to native vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive
government.
This train of argument, 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