The tone recalls the tone of Pitt and Castlereagh in proposing the Union.  But Fitzgibbon went more directly to the point in saying outright that, Ireland having been conquered and confiscated, the colonists “were at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island,” and that laws must be framed by an external power to “meet the vicious propensities of human nature.”  Let us recognize unreservedly that the words of the Transvaal despatch were the outcome of deep and sincere conviction.  That is the worst of it.  From age to age Ireland has to suffer for the depth and sincerity of these convictions.  There, too, the cleavage of race and religion, never complete, always defying the official efforts to “stereotype and emphasize it,” to quote the despatch of 1905, grows fainter with time, and will grow fainter as long as the national movement lives to draw men together in the common interest of Ireland.  The Volunteers, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, many of the Young Irelanders, Isaac Butt, Parnell, were Protestants.  And there is a strong band of Protestant Home Rulers to-day in Ulster and out of it, landlords, tenants, capitalists, labourers, Members of Parliament, and clergymen, who declare that they are not afraid of Catholic oppression, and who are told by Unionists that they ought to be.  And in Ireland, too, the Roman Catholic majority are told, rarely, it is true, in the courteous phrases of Mr. Lyttelton’s despatch, that they “cannot be expected to entertain the most cordial feelings towards the Government.”  In Ireland, also, is a “political system which admittedly has its difficulties,” ironical euphemism for a system whose analogue in the Transvaal could have been used by the subject race, had they so willed, to bring civil government to a standstill, without the means of furnishing anything better, and which under the Act of Union can be, and has been, used to dislocate the Parliamentary life of the United Kingdom.  The Boers were asked “as a people of practical genius” to assist the “smooth working” of an unworkable Constitution, so as to promote the “reconciliation of two great and kindred races.”  The Irish are pursued with invective for legitimately using the constitutional power given them in order, while freeing Parliament from an intolerable incubus, to gain the right to elicit character and responsibility in themselves by shouldering their own burdens and saving their own souls.

If the official view of the Transvaal was mistaken, the summit of error was reached in the view taken of the Orange River Colony.  In that Colony, which was almost wholly pastoral and Dutch, and which until the war had enjoyed free institutions uninterruptedly for half a century, and had made remarkably good vise of them, representative government, even of the illusory kind designed for the Transvaal, was to be indefinitely postponed, postponed at any rate until the results of the “experiment” in the Transvaal had been observed.