[Sidenote:  The evils of maintaining the Union]

The nature and extent of these evils has been considered in criticising the arguments in favour of Home Rule.  A bare enumeration of them therefore may here suffice.

[Sidenote:  1.  Complication of English policy.]

First.—­The Union hampers and complicates English policy, and this even independently of the existing agitation for Home Rule.  The tenacity of England during the war with America, her triumphant energy during the revolutionary struggle, were due to a unity of feeling on the part, at any rate, of her governing classes, which even under the most favourable circumstances can hardly exist in a Parliament containing, as the Parliament of the United Kingdom always must contain, a large body of Irish Roman Catholics.  If it be urged that the presence of Roman Catholics is due to the Catholic Emancipation Act, and not to the Act of Union, the remark is true but irrelevant.  No maintainer or assailant of the Union is insane enough to propose the repeal of the Emancipation Act.

[Sidenote:  2.  Obstruction]

Secondly.—­The refusal of Home Rule involves a long, tedious, and demoralising contest with opponents will use, and from their own point of view have a right to use, all the arts of obstruction and of Parliamentary intrigue.  The battle of the Constitution must be fought out in Parliament, and if it is to be won, Englishmen may be compelled to forego for a time much useful legislation, to modify the rules of party government, and, it is possible, even the forms of the Constitution.

[Sidenote:  3.  Strict government in Ireland.]

Thirdly.—­If the Union is to be maintained with advantage to any part of the United Kingdom, the people of the United Kingdom must make the most strenuous, firm, and continuous effort, lasting, it may well be, for twenty years or more, to enforce throughout every part of the United Kingdom obedience to the law of the land.  This effort can only be justified by the equally strenuous determination (which must involve an infinity of trouble) to give ear to every Irish complaint, and to see that the laws which the Irish people obey are laws of justice, and (what is much the same thing) laws which in the long run the people of Ireland will feel to be just.  To carry out this course of action is difficult for all governments, is perhaps specially difficult for a democratic government.  To maintain the Union is no easy task, though it has yet to be proved that any form of Home Rule will give more ease to the people of England; nor can the difficulty be got rid of, though it may be somewhat changed, by abolishing the Irish representation in Parliament, or by treating Ireland as a Crown colony.  Such steps, which could hardly be termed maintenance of the Union, might, as expedients for carrying through safely a course of reform, be morally and for a time justifiable.  Their adoption is, however, liable to an almost insuperable objection.  Democracy in Great Britain does not comport with official autocracy in Ireland.  Every government must be true to its principles, and a democracy which played the benevolent despot would suffer demoralisation.