“The name of ‘Self-government’ has a natural fascination for Englishmen; but a policy which cannot satisfy the wishes of Home Rulers, which may—­it is likely enough—­be of no benefit to the Irish people, which will certainly weaken the Government in its contest with lawlessness and oppression, is not a policy which obviously commends itself to English good sense."[18]

Well may this distinguished “Supporter of things as they are” declare:  “The maintenance of the Union [on such terms] must necessarily turn out as severe a task as ever taxed a nation’s energies; for to maintain the Union with any good effect, means that, while refusing to accede to the wishes of millions of Irishmen, we must sedulously do justice to every fair demand from Ireland; must strenuously, and without fear or favour, assert the equal rights of landlords and tenants, of Protestants and Catholics; and must, at the same time, put down every outrage and reform every abuse.”

What hope is there of this?  Our only guide to the probabilities of the future is our experience of the past And what has that been in Ireland?  In every year since the Legislative Union there have been multitudes of men in England as upright, as enlightened, as well-intentioned towards Ireland, as Professor Dicey, and with better opportunities of translating their thoughts into acts.  Yet what has been the result? Si monumenlum requiris circumspice.  Behold Ireland at this moment, and examine every year of its history since the Union.  Do the annals of any constitutional Government in the world present so portentous a monument of Parliamentary failure, so vivid an example of a moral and material ruin “paved with good intentions”?  Therein lies the pathos of it.  Not from malice, not from cruelty, not from wanton injustice, not even from callous indifference to suffering and wrong, does our misgovernment of Ireland come.  If the evil had its root in deliberate wrong-doing on the part of England it would probably have been cured long ago.  But each generation, while freely confessing the sins of its fathers, has protested its own innocence and boasted of its own achievements, and then, with a pharisaic sense of rectitude, has complacently pointed to some inscrutable flaw in the Irish character as the key to the Irish problem.  The generation which passed the Act of Union, oblivious of British pledges solemnly given and lightly broken, wondered what had become of the prosperity and contentment which the promoters of the Union had promised to Ireland.  The next generation made vicarious penance, and preferred the enactment of Catholic emancipation to the alternative of civil war; and then wondered in its turn that Ireland still remained unpacified.  Then came a terrible famine, followed by evictions on a scale so vast and cruel that the late Sir Robert Peel declared that no parallel could be found for such a tale of inhumanity in “the records of any country, civilized or barbarous.”