Both parties, however, like parties elsewhere, propose and oppose
measures and movements, and accept or reject policies, simply to get
office or keep office.
In the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so
far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great
Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial
federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only
bond of union--the crown, and not the English parliament, being the
titular and actual sovereign. Sovereign power over America in the
parliament Franklin never would admit.
It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be
dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland
has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards
it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect
for authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture
of untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has
physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged
country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty
of its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental
constitution, alien in race, temperament, and religion, having
scarcely one point of sympathy with the English.