have irritated and retarded every community in which they have been allowed to take root.  A sound agrarian system has been the primary need of every country.  To take the closest parallel, if absentee proprietorship and insecurity of tenure kept little Prince Edward Island, peacefully and legally settled, backward and disturbed for a century, it is not surprising that Ireland, submitted to confiscation, the Penal Code, and commercial rum, did not flourish under a land system beside which that of Prince Edward Island was a paradise.  Tardy redress of the worst Irish abuses is no defence of the system which created them and sustained them with such ruinous results.  No white community of pride and spirit would willingly tolerate the grotesque form of Crown Colony administration, founded on force, and now tempered by a kind of paternal State Socialism, under which Ireland lives to-day.  Unionism for Ireland is anti-Imperialist.  Its upholders strenuously opposed colonial autonomy, and but yesterday were passionately opposing South African autonomy.  To-day colonial autonomy is an axiom.  But Ireland is a measure of the depth of these convictions.  There would be no Empire to idealize if their Irish principles had been applied just a little longer to any of the oversea States which constitute the self-governing Colonies of to-day.  As it is, these principles have wrought great and perhaps lasting mischief which, in the righteous glow of self-congratulation upon what we are accustomed to call our constructive political genius, we are too apt to overlook.  It was bad for America to pass through that phase of agitation and discord which preceded the revolutionary war.  It was demoralizing for the Canadas to be driven into rebellion by the vices of ascendancy government.  Mr. Gladstone, speaking of Australian autonomy, was right in satirizing the “miserable jargon” about fitting men for political privileges, and in demonstrating the harm done by withholding those privileges.  And the Irish race all over the world, fine race as it is, would be finer still if Ireland had been free.

The political habits formed in dealing with Ireland have disastrously influenced Imperial policy in the past.  Cannot we, by a supreme national effort, reverse the mental process, and, if we have always failed in the past to learn from Irish lessons how not to treat the Colonies, at any rate learn, even at the eleventh hour, from our colonial lessons how to treat Ireland?  Must we for ever sound the old alarms about “disloyalty” and “dismemberment” and “abandonment of the loyal minority to the tender mercies of their foes”; phrases as old as the Stamp Act of 1765?  Must we carry the “gentle art of making enemies,” practised to the last point of danger in the Colonies, to the preposterous pitch of estranging men at our very doors, while pluming ourselves on the friendship of peoples 12,000 miles away?  These are anxious times.  We have a mighty rival in Europe, and we need the co-operation of all our hands and brains.  On a basis of mere profit and loss, is it sensible to maintain a system in Ireland which weakens both Ireland and the whole United Kingdom, clogs the delicate machinery of Parliamentary government, and, worked out in hard figures of pounds, shillings, and pence, has ceased even to show a pecuniary advantage?