[Sidenote:  National Independence.]

Home Rule does not mean National Independence.  This proposition needs no elaboration.  Any plan of Home Rule whatever implies that there are spheres of national life in which Ireland is not to act with the freedom of an independent State.  Mr. Parnell and his followers accept in principle Mr. Gladstone’s proposals, and therefore are willing to accept for Ireland restrictions on her political liberty absolutely inconsistent with the principle of nationality.  Under the Gladstonian constitution her foreign policy is to be wholly regulated by a British Parliament in which sit no Irish representatives; she is not to have the right either of raising an army or of endowing a church; she is in fact to surrender any claim to the rights of a nation in consideration of receiving a certain number of State-rights.  In all this there is nothing unreasonable and nothing blameworthy.  One part of the United Kingdom is prepared to accept new terms of partnership.  But this acceptance, though reasonable and fair enough, is quite inconsistent with any claim for national independence.  A nation is one thing, a state forming part of a federation is quite another.  To ask for the position of a dependent colony like Victoria, or of a province such as Ontario, is to renounce the demand to be a nation.  A bona fide Home Ruler cannot be a bona fide Nationalist.  This point deserves attention, not for the sake of the miserable and ruinous advantage which is obtained by taunting an adversary in controversy with inconsistency till you drive him to improve his logical position by increasing the exactingness of his demands, but because the advocates of Home Rule (honestly enough, no doubt) confuse the matter under discussion by a strange kind of intellectual shuffle.  When they wish to minimise the sacrifice to England of establishing a Parliament in Ireland, they bring Home Rule down nearly to the proportions of Local Self-Government; when they wish to maximise—­if the word may be allowed—­the blessings to Ireland of a separate legislature, they all but identify Home Rule with National Independence.  Yet you have no more right to expect from any form of State-rights the new life which sometimes is roused among a people by the spirit and the responsibilities of becoming a nation, than you have to suppose that municipal councils will satisfy the feelings which demand an Irish Parliament.

FOOTNOTES: 

[2] See Dicey, Law of the Constitution (2nd ed.), p. 80.

[3] De Beaumont’s opinions on this point are perfectly clear:  they represent the judgment of an extremely able thinker, who approaches the problems presented by Irish society with an impartiality which from the nature of things is unattainable by any Englishman or Irishman.  His utterances will moreover command the more respect from the consideration that De Beaumont, belonging as he did to the school of his intimate