"This is Mr. Parnell's language at Nottingham, but would he venture to
use the same arguments in this country? Would he enumerate clearly to
an Irish audience the countless advantages they derive from Imperial
funds and Imperial credit, and tell them that the first step to Home
Rule is the sacrifice of all these advantages? Our great system of
national education is provided out of Imperial funds to the extent of
about a million a year; so are the various institutions for the
encouragement of science and art which adorn Dublin and our other
large towns. The Baltimore School of Fishery and other technical
training places, the piers and harbours on the Irish Coast, the system
of light railways, and the draining of rivers and reclamation of waste
lands, are all supported out of the Imperial Exchequer. The Board of
Works alone has been the medium of lending almost five millions of
money on easy terms under the Land Improvement Acts in the country.
Nor have the agricultural interests been neglected. For erecting
farmhouses alone over £700,000 has been given, while immense sums have
been spent in working the Land Acts. For drainage over two millions
have been lent, and a sum of over one million has been remitted from
the debt. A debt of eight and a-half millions appears in the last
return as outstanding from the Board of Irish Public Works, besides
three millions and a-half from the corresponding board in England. In
fact, there is not a project enumerated by Mr. Parnell as necessary,
under a new _régime_, to promote the 'Nationality of Ireland,' which
is not at present being helped on by the funds or the credit of the
'alien Government.' All these national advantages the supporter of a
shadowy Home Rule bids us give up."
If ever there was a case of the spider and the fly in human affairs
this mild and perfectly equitable reasoning of Mr. Parnell is the
illustration. How about the djinn crying inside the sealed jar, and
the fate of the credulous fisherman who obeys that voice and breaks
the seal which Solomon the Wise set against him?
In writing this pamphlet I have not cared for graces of literary style
or dramatic strength of composition; and I have largely supported
myself by quotations as a proof that I am not a mere impressionist,
but have a solid back-ground and a firm foothold for all that I have
said. Judged by these extracts it would seem that, outside the right
of full communal self-government, the cry for Home Rule is either
interested and fictitious--or when sincere--save in certain splendid
exceptions, of whom Mr. Laing is the honoured chief, and the only Home
Ruler who makes me doubt the rightness of my own conversion--it is a
mere sentimental impulse shorn of practical power and working
capacity. In any case it is a one-sided thing, leaving out of court
Ulster, the integrity of the Empire, and the obligations of historic
continuity. It is a cry that has been echoed by violence and murder,
by outrage and ruin, and that has in it one overwhelming element of
weakness--exaggeration. It is the cry at its best of enthusiasts whose
ideas of human life and governmental potentialities are too generous
for every-day practice--at its worst but another word for self. For
the men who raise it and hound on these poor dupes to their own
destruction are men who would be rulers of the country in their own
persons, or members of a Gladstonian ministry, were the Home Rule
party to come to the front. With neither section does the strength,
the glory, the integrity, and the continuance of the Empire count;
and the honour of England, like the true well-being of Ireland, is
the last thing thought of by either party. The motto of the one is:
"_Fiat justitia ruat caelum_"--of the other: "_Après moi le déluge._"
The one abjures the necessities of statesmanship, the other the
self-restraints of patriotism. Surely the good, wholesome, working
principles of sound government lie with neither, but rather with the
steady continuance of things as they are--modified as occasion arises
and the needs of the case demand.