Rule for Ireland?  How do they explain away the support for that policy in the Dominions?  It seems to me that their only resource would be to say:  “We are bound to maintain, and we have the necessary physical force to maintain, the present political system in Ireland, because to alter it would impair the formal legislative ‘unity’ of the United Kingdom; but let us frankly admit that as long as we take this view there can be no ‘Union’ in the highest sense of the word.  Ireland must be retarded and estranged.  We cannot raise Territorial Volunteers within her borders; on the contrary, we must keep and pay for a standing army of police to preserve our authority there.  Her population must diminish, her vital energy ebb away to other lands; as a market for our goods and as a source of revenue for Imperial purposes she must remain undeveloped and unprogressive.  She will continue rightly to agitate for Home Rule, and this agitation will always be baneful both to her and to us.  It will distract her energies from her own economic and social problems.  It will embitter and degrade our politics, and dislocate our Parliamentary institutions.  She must suffer, we must suffer, the Empire must suffer.  It is sad, but inevitable.”

Morality aside, is that common sense?  Is it strange that the Colonies themselves regard such logic, when applied to Ireland, as perverted and absurd?

Before leaving Australia we have only to recall the fact that at the close of the last century, after a generation of controversy and negotiation, the Canadian example of 1867 was at length imitated, and the Federal Union formed which amalgamated all the mainland States, together with Tasmania, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and that the Union was sanctioned and legalized by the Imperial Act of 1900.  New Zealand preferred to remain a distinct State.  The Australians departed in some important respects from the Canadian model, the main difference being that a greater measure of independence was retained by the individual States, and smaller powers delegated to the central Government.  This was a matter of voluntary arrangement as between the States themselves, the Home Government standing wholly aside on the sound principle that Australia knew its own interests best, and that what was best for Australia was best for the Empire.

FOOTNOTES: 

[29] Letter to Lord Malmesbury, August 13, 1852 ("Memoirs of an Ex-Minister,” by the Earl of Malmesbury, vol. i., p. 344).

[30] “Life of Gladstone,” vol. i., p. 363.

[31] Annual Treasury Returns ["Imperial Revenue (Collection and Expenditure)"].  According to these returns, Ireland’s Imperial contribution in 1839, before the famine, was L3,626,322; in 1849, after the famine, L2,613,778, and in 1859-60 no less than L5,396,000.  At the latter date the Colonies were estimated to cost three and a half millions a year, of which nine-tenths were contributed by the taxpayers at home, British and Irish.