The Framework of Home Rule | Page 3

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 the
Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a dangerous nationality. Did the proof
of the error in Canada induce Englishmen to question the soundness of
the precedent on which the error was based? On the contrary, the lesson
passed unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken
thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and
Imperial policy to this very day. It even had the truly extraordinary
retrospective effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent
statesmen the significance of the Canadian parallel; for it is only six
years ago that a Secretary of State for the Colonies penned a despatch
recommending for the Transvaal a form of government similar to that
which actually produced the Canadian disorders of 1837, and
supporting it by an argument whose effect was not merely to resuscitate
what time had proved to be false in Durham's doctrine, but to discard
what time had proved to be true. As for Ireland herself, I know no more
curious illustration of the strong tendency, even on the part of the most
fair-minded men, to place that country outside the pale of social or
political science, and of the extreme reluctance to judge its inhabitants
by the elementary standards of human conduct, than the book to which
I referred above--Mr. Locker-Lampson's "A Consideration of Ireland in

the Nineteenth Century." For what he admits to be the ruinous results
of British Government in the past, the author in the last few pages of a
lengthy volume has no better cure to suggest than a continuance of
British government, and he defends this course by a terse enumeration
of the very phenomena which in Durham's opinion rendered the grant
of Home Rule to Canada imperative, concluding with a paragraph
which, with the substitution of "Canada" for "Ireland," constitutes an
admirably condensed epitome of the arguments used both by politicians
at home, and the minorities in Canada, in favour of Durham's error and
against the truth he established.
Mr. Lecky represents a somewhat different school of thought, and
reached his Unionism by reasoning more profound and consistent, but,
on the other hand, wholly destructive of the Imperial theory as held by
the modern school of Imperialists. His fear and distrust of democracy in
all its forms and in all lands[2] was such that he naturally dreaded Irish
Nationalism, which is a form of democratic revolt suppressed so long
and by such harsh methods as to exhibit features easily open to
criticism. But the gist of his argument would have applied just as well
to the political evolution of the self-governing Colonies. Indeed, if he
had lived to see the last Imperial Conference, the pessimism of so clear
a thinker would assuredly have given way before the astounding
contrast between those countries in which his political philosophy had
been abjured, and the only white country in the Empire where by sheer
force it had been maintained intact.
If my only object in writing were to contribute something toward the
dissipation of the fears and doubts which render it so hard to carry any
measure, however small, of Home Rule for Ireland, I should hope for
little success. Practical men, with a practical decision to make, rarely
look outside the immediate facts before them. Extremists, in a case like
that of Ireland, are reluctant to take account of what Lord Morley calls
"the fundamental probabilities of civil society." Sir Edward Carson
would be more than human if he were to be influenced by a
demonstration that the case he makes against Home Rule is the same as
that made by the minority leaders, not only in the French, but in the
British Province of Canada. Most of the minority to which he appeals
would now regard as an ill-timed paradox the view that the very vigour
of their opposition to Home Rule is a better omen for the success of

Home Rule than that kind of sapless Nationalism, astonishingly rare in
Ireland under the circumstances, which is inclined to yield to the
insidious temptation of setting the "eleemosynary benefits"--to use Mr.
Walter Long's phrase[3]--derived from the