“Give Ireland,” writes Mr. Finch,[35] “the management of her own affairs, and you will see called into her service the ablest and most capable of her sons; while, as things now stand, the intellect of Ireland is shut out from all share in the administration.  With careers at home worthy of the best and ablest of the people, much of the wealth which is now drained off from Ireland without any return, will be expended in developing the industrial resources of the country; industry will revive, and with the revival of industry will come employment for the people.  ’It is the difficulty of living by wages in Ireland,’ says Sir G.C.  Lewis, ’which makes every man look to the land for maintenance.’  With employment for the people, half the difficulty of the land question will be solved.  If, then, we wish to promote the moral and material welfare of the Irish people, let us make them masters of their own affairs.”

“I have indicated what I believe,” writes Mr. O’Neill Daunt,[36] “to be the radical disease of Ireland:  the want of a domestic legislature racy of the soil, and acting in harmony with the national sentiment.  God has created Ireland with the needs of a separate nation, and with the needs are associated the rights.  ‘Our patent to be a State, not a shire,’ said Goold in 1799, ’comes direct from Heaven.  The Almighty has in majestic characters signed the great charter of our independence.  The great Creator of the world has given our beloved country the gigantic outlines of a kingdom.’

“If Ireland had been left the unfettered use of the natural materials of wealth in her soil and in her people, and of the facilities of internal and external commerce supplied by her physical configuration and her geographical position—­if her interests were protected by a Parliament sitting in her capital, securing the expenditure at home of her annual revenue, both public and private, rendering impossible that destructive haemorrhage of her income by which she is impoverished, aiding the development of her industries, and resisting all aggression on her commercial and political rights—­in a word, if the Irish Constitution had not been treacherously undermined and overthrown, we should now have been the best support of the Empire, instead of being its scandal and its weakness.”

Politicians who write thus expect far more from national independence than nationality itself can give.  More than fifty years have elapsed since Spain expelled the foreign invader; but Spain has not yet succeeded in expelling ignorance, prejudice, superstition, or oppression.  But whatever be the miracles of nationality, Ireland would not, under Federalism, be a nation.  Rhode Island has all the freedom demanded for his country by an eminent Home Ruler, whose expressions I have cited.  He surely does not consider the inhabitants of Rhode Island to be a nation.