no absolute moral right to improve his own position by torturing or murdering any solvent neighbour who may be inclined to pay his own debts.  To maintain the Union is to maintain the effort to perform the obligations of the country, and to compel all citizens of the country to perform the duties imposed by law.  The effort is an arduous one, the more so since it must be combined with the equally strenuous endeavour to see that in Ireland, as in every part of the United Kingdom, the demands of the law be made to coincide with the demands of morality and of humanity.  Still pactum serva is a good maxim for nations no less than for individuals:  there may be a higher law than the rule of keeping one’s promise, but before a man or a government incurs even the appearance of bad faith, it were well to see whether the so-called higher law of conscience may not in reality be the lower dictates of indolence or cowardice.  Neither nations nor individuals are bound in duty to do impossibilities.  The limit of power is the limit of responsibility, but if England can no longer enforce justice in Ireland, there will still be the grave question whether this fearful result of past misdoing or error does not suggest and justify Separation rather than Home Rule.

CHAPTER VI.

SEPARATION.

[Sidenote:  Evils of Separation]

Englishmen are so firmly and with such good reason convinced that the independence of Ireland would be fatal to the greatness and security of Great Britain, that they rarely attempt to weigh accurately the grounds of reason which may be adduced in support of a conviction which has acquired the character of a political instinct.  The evils, however, to England which may be reasonably anticipated from the political separation of the two countries may be summed up under three heads.

First.—­The acquiescence by England in Irish independence would be a deliberate and complete surrender of the objects at which English statesmanship has, under one form or another, aimed for centuries.  Such a surrender would, in addition to its material effects, inflict an amount of moral discredit on England which would itself be the cause of serious dangers.  That a powerful nation should (except under the force of crushing defeat) assent to an arrangement which would decrease its resources and authority must inevitably appear to all the world to be, and probably would be in reality, such a sign either of declining strength or of declining spirit as would in a short time provoke the aggression of rivals and enemies.  Abdication of royal or imperial authority is with States no less than with individuals the precursor of death.  Loss of territory, indeed, in consequence of defeat, is in itself only in so far damaging as defeat may imply a want of capacity to resist attack, or as the diminution of territory may involve loss of resources.  Thus the surrender of Lombardy by Austria, of Alsace