How, lastly, to devise a scheme of Home Rule which, while giving to Ireland as much of legislative independence as may satisfy her wants or wishes, shall leave to England as much supremacy as may be necessary for the prosperity of the United Kingdom, or for the continued existence of the British Empire, is a problem which jurists would find it hard to solve as a matter of speculative science, and which politicians may not without reason hold to admit of no practical solution.

Yet Maintenance of the Union, Separation, Home Rule, are names which designate the only paths open to us.  To one of these three courses we are absolutely tied down.  Each path is arduous.  To complain about the nature of things is childish.  The course of wisdom is obvious.  We must all of us look facts in the face.  “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be.  Why then should we desire to be deceived?"[71] We must calmly compare the advantages of the three steep roads which lie open to the nation, and then on the strength of this comparison determine the course which the nation is bound to follow by motives of expediency and of justice.

Such a comparison we have already instituted:[72] its results to any reader who assents to my train of reasoning must be obvious.

The maintenance of the Union involves at the outset a strenuous and most regrettable conflict with the will of the majority of the Irish people.  It necessitates at once the strict enforcement of law, combined with the resolute effort to strip law of all injustice.  It may require large pecuniary sacrifices, and it certainly will require a constancy in just purpose which is supposed, and not without reason, to be specially difficult to a democracy.  The difficulties on the other hand which meet us are not unprecedented, though some of them have assumed a new form.  We have some advantages unknown to our forefathers:  we can, more easily than they could, remodel the practices of the Constitution, modify the rules of party government, or, incredible as it may seem to members of Parliament, touch with profane hands the venerable procedure of the House of Commons.  The English democracy, further, just because it is a democracy, may, like the democracy of America, enforce with unflinching firmness laws which, representing the deliberate will of the people, are supported by the vast majority of the citizens of the United Kingdom.  The English democracy, because it is a democracy, may also with a good conscience destroy the remnants of feudal institutions, and all systems of land tenure found unsuitable to the wants of the Irish people.  Nor, though the crisis be difficult, are there features lacking in the tendencies of the modern world which in the United Kingdom as in the United States and in the Swiss Confederacy favour every effort to uphold the political unity of the State.  Whatever be the difficulties (and they are many) of maintaining