Centuries of experience have not yet secured general acceptation for this simple principle.  In this domain of thought the tenacity of error is marvellous, even if we make full allowance for the disturbing effect on men’s minds of India and other coloured dependencies where despotic, or semi-despotic, systems are in vogue.  Since the expansion of England began in the seventeenth century, it cannot be said that the principle of trusting white races to manage their own affairs has ever received the express and conscious sanction of a united British people.  It has been repeatedly repudiated by Governments in the most categorical terms, and repudiated sometimes to the point of bloodshed.  In other cases it has met with lazy retrospective acquiescence on the discovery that powers surreptitiously obtained or granted without formal legislation had not been abused.  The Australian Acts of 1850 and 1855 were the first approach to a spontaneous application of the full principle; but even then many statesmen were not fully alive to the consequences of their action, while there was no public interest, and very little Parliamentary interest, in the fate of these remote dependencies.  The fully developed modern doctrine of comradeship with the great self-governing Dominions, a doctrine which we may date from the accession of Mr. Chamberlain to Colonial Secretaryship in 1895, was not the natural outcome of a belief in self-government, but a sudden and effusive acceptation of its matured results in certain definite cases.  Irish Home Rule itself had, in the preceding decade, twice been rejected by the nation.  With the first opportunity, after 1895, of testing belief in the principle, namely, in the Transvaal Constitution of 1905, the Government failed.  Finally, in 1906, when, to redeem that failure, for the first time in the whole history of the Empire a Cabinet spontaneously and unreservedly declared its full belief in the principle, and translated that belief into law, the whole of the Opposition, representing nearly half the electorate, washed their hands of the policy, and, if the constitutional means had existed, would, admittedly, have defeated it, as they had defeated the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893.  The change of national opinion has, I believe, been considerable; but the circumstances remain ominous for the dispassionate discussion of the Irish Constitution.  Patriotic people can only do their best to ensure that the grant of Home Rule shall not be nullified by restrictions and limitations which, if they are designed merely to appease opposition, are destined to create friction and discontent.