that no scheme of legislative independence for Ireland offers any promise of finality, also suggests that the form of Home Rule least injurious to England is the form which gives Ireland most independence.  The inference from these facts cannot be missed.  Home Rule is the half-way house to Separation.  Grant it, and in a short time Irish independence will become the wish of England.  If any thorough-paced Home Ruler admit this conclusion, and suggest that Home Rule is a desirable transition towards Separation, the answer is that Home Rule is such a transition, but assuredly that such a transition is not to be desired.  If one country is destined to become independent of another it is better for each not to experience the disappointment and the heartburning which accompany a period of unwilling connection.

This is the result of the comparison we have instituted between the three possible courses open to England.  If the comparison be just the conclusion to which its leads is obvious.  The maintenance of the Union is at this moment to England a matter of duty even more than of interest.  If the time should come when the effort to maintain the unity of the State is too great for the power of Great Britain, or the only means by which it is found maintainable are measures clearly repugnant to the humanity or the justice or the democratic principles of the English people,—­if it should turn out that after every effort to enforce just laws by just methods our justice itself, from whatever cause, remains hateful to the mass of the Irish people,—­then it will be clear that the Union must for the sake of England, no less than of Ireland, come to an end.  The alternative policy will then be not Home Rule but Separation.  We shall save the unity at the expense of lessening the territory of the State; we shall escape self-reproach because having reached the limit of our powers we shall also have filled up the measure of our obligations.  But if (as there is every reason to suppose) agrarian misery is the source of Irish discontent, and agrarian misery springs in part from bad administration, and in part from the law governing the tenure of land; if, in general terms, the undoubted ills of Ireland are curable by justice, even though justice proceed from the Parliament of the United Kingdom—­an assembly, be it noted, in which the voice of Ireland is freely heard—­then there is no need to indulge in speculations, always dangerous, upon a possible remedy which may never be necessary, and which, while the inhabitants of England and Ireland are still fellow-citizens of one State, it is painful even to contemplate.  On the whole, then, it appears that whatever changes or calamities the future may have in store, the maintenance of the Union is at this day the one sound policy for England to pursue.  It is sound because it is expedient; it is sound because it is just.

[Sidenote:  Character of England’s case]