law of the Courts is opposed to the customs, to the moral sentiment, we may say to the law of the people; hence the Queen’s tribunals are weak because they are not supported by that popular assent whence judges derive half their authority; the tribunals of the League are strong because their decisions commend themselves to the traditional feeling of the people.  But the doubtful hypothesis and the undoubted fact, though one or other of them lies at the basis of all the strongest arguments in favour of Home Rule, each invalidate almost as much as they support the contention that an Irish Parliament will prove the specific for the diseases (due in the first instance to the original vice of the connection between England and Ireland) under which Irish society now suffers.  If the passion of nationality is the cause of the malady, then the proposed cure is useless, for Home Rule will not turn the people of Ireland into a nation.  If a vicious system of land tenure is the cause of lawlessness, then the restoration or re-creation of an Irish Parliament is needless, for the Parliament of the United Kingdom can reform, and ought to reform, the land system of Ireland, and ought to be able to carry through a final settlement of agrarian disputes with less injustice to individuals than could any Parliament sitting at Dublin.

Reasoning, however, which fails to establish the expediency of creating an Irish Parliament may prove, and in fact does amply prove, that the task of maintaining peace order and freedom in Ireland is at the present juncture a matter of supreme difficulty.  Any possible course, moreover, open to English statesmanship involves gigantic inconvenience, not to say tremendous perils.  A man involved practically in the conduct of public affairs may easily bring himself to believe that the policy which he recommends is not only the best possible under the circumstances, but is also open to no serious objection.  Outsiders, who in this matter are better because more impartial judges than the ablest of politicians, know that this is not so.  We have nothing before us but a choice of difficulties or of evils.  Every course is open to valid criticism.

The maintenance of the Union must necessarily turn out as severe a task as ever taxed a nation’s energies, for to maintain the Treaty of 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 either 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.

To carry out by peaceful means the political separation of countries which for good and for evil have for centuries been bound together by position and by history, is an operation so critical that in the judgment of statesmen it involves dangers too vast for serious contemplation.