A calm observer can even now see that the complete dissolution of the connection between Great Britain and Ireland, disastrous as in many respects such an event would undoubtedly be, holds out to the larger country the possibility of two advantages.

Loss of territory might be equivalent in some aspects to increase of power.

There exists in Europe no country so completely at unity with itself as Great Britain.  Fifty years of reform have done their work, and have removed the discontents, the divisions, the disaffection, and the conspiracies which marked the first quarter or the first half of this century.  Great Britain, if left to herself, could act with all the force, consistency, and energy given by unity of sentiment and community of interests.  The distraction and the uncertainty of our political aims, the feebleness and inconsistency with which they are pursued, arise, in part at least, from the connection with Ireland.  Neither Englishmen nor Irishmen are to blame for the fact that it is difficult for communities differing in historical associations and in political conceptions to keep step together in the path of progress.  For other evils arising from the connection the blame must rest on English Statesmen.  All the inherent vices of party government, all the weaknesses of the Parliamentary system, all the evils arising from the perverse notion that reform ought always to be preceded by a period of lengthy and more than half-factitious agitation met by equally factitious resistance, have been fostered and increased by the inter-action of Irish and English politics.  No one can believe that the inveterate habit of ruling one part of the United Kingdom on principles which no one would venture to apply to the government of any other part of it, can have produced anything but the most injurious effect on the stability of our Government and the character of our public men.  The advocates of Home Rule find by far their strongest arguments for influencing English opinion, in the proofs which they produce that England, no less than Ireland, has suffered from a political arrangement under which legal union has failed to secure moral unity; these arguments, whatever their strength, are, however, it must be noted, far more available to a Nationalist than to an advocate of Federalism.  English authority in Ireland would be increased by the possession of that freedom of action which every powerful State exercises in its dealings with a weaker though an independent nation.  There is something so repulsive to the best feelings of citizenship in even the hypothetical contemplation of the advantages (such as they are) which would accrue to Great Britain from the transformation of thousands of our fellow-countrymen into aliens, that it is painful to trace out in clear language the strength of the position which England would occupy towards the Irish Republic.  But in argument the strict following out of the conclusions flowing from facts is a form of honesty, and however