One other point survives in its integrity from the case made by Mr. Chamberlain in 1893, and that is the argument about distance.  Clearly this is a quite distinct contention from the last; for distance from any given point does not by itself radically alter human nature.  Australians are not twice as good or twice as bad as South Africans because they are twice as far from the Mother Country.  “Does anybody doubt”—­let me repeat his words—­“that if Ireland were a thousand miles from England she would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?” The whole tragedy of Ireland lies in that “if”; but the condition is, without doubt, still unsatisfied.  Ireland is still only sixty miles away from the English shores, and the argument from proximity, for what it is worth, is still plausible.  To a vast number of minds it still seems conclusive.  Put the South African parallel to the average moderate Unionist, half disposed to admit the force of this analogy, he would nevertheless answer:  “Ah, but Ireland is so near.”  Well, let us join issue on the two grounds I have indicated—­the ground of Irish abnormality, and the ground of Ireland’s proximity.  It will be found, I think, that neither contention is tenable by itself; that a supporter of one unconsciously or consciously reinforces it by reference to the other, and that to refute one is to refute both.  It will be found, too, that, apart from mechanical and unessential difficulties, the whole case against Home Rule is included and summed up in these two contentions, and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly eased and illuminated by their refutation.

II.

Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish Channel—­if only every Englishman could realize their tremendous significance in Anglo-Irish history—­what an ineffectual barrier “in the long result of time” to colonization and conquest; what an impassable barrier—­through the ignorance and perversity of British statesmanship—­to sympathy and racial fusion!

For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance from Europe gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, and freedom to work out her own destiny.  She never, for good or ill, underwent Roman occupation or Teutonic invasion.  She was secure enough to construct and maintain unimpaired a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous, and marvellously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture.  She produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle scholars and divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians.  She had a passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years sent her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and wide over Europe.  For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have absorbed into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately retained a footing on her eastern shores.