of friends into enemies, of peaceable citizens into plotters of treason, of farmers into criminals, of poets and statesmen into gaolbirds; the check to the production of wealth and Anglo-Irish commerce; the dislocation and demoralization of Parliamentary life; and, saddest results of all, the reactionary effect upon British statesmanship, domestic and Imperial, and the deterioration of Irish character within Ireland.  The voluntary principle—­at any rate, among the English-speaking races—­is as essential to a true Union, like that of the South African Colonies or that of Scotland and England, as to a Federation.  It is a sheer impossibility to create a perfect, mechanical Union on a basis of hatred and coercion; witness the strangely anomalous colonial features surviving in Irish Government—­the Lord-Lieutenancy, the separate administration, and the standing army of police.

Persons inclined to reckon the advantages, whether of Federation or of Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may regard the psychological requirement as fanciful.  It is not fanciful; on the contrary, it is related in the clearest way to the concrete facts of the situation.  Before there is any question of Federation Ireland needs to find herself, to test her own potentialities, to prove independence of character, thought, and action, and to discover what she can do by her own unaided will with her own resources.  As I endeavoured to show in the last chapter, these are the true reasons for Home Rule.

Home Rule is neither a luxury nor a plaything, but a tremendously exacting duty which must be undertaken by every country conscious of repression and valuing its self-respect, and which Ireland is praying to be allowed to undertake.  When a people has learnt to understand the extent of its own powers and limitations, then it can safely and honourably co-operate on a Federal basis with other peoples, and, in the interests of efficiency and economy, can delegate to a central Government, partly of its own choice, functions hitherto locally exercised.  Once more, that is the origin of all true Federations, British and foreign, in all parts of the world.

If, then, the Home Rule Bill cannot in legal form be a federating or unifying measure, it must be one of a precisely opposite character, and a measure of devolution.  It is a proof of the need for a scientific nomenclature that the word “devolution” has to Irish ears come to mean something similar in kind to “Federal” Home Rule, but less in degree, and something different in kind from “Colonial” Home Rule, and infinitely less in degree.  What a tangle of truth and fallacy from the misuse of a single word!  It is associated rightly with the ill-starred Irish Council Bill of 1907, and it has been universally but wrongly used to indicate a small measure of local government in contradistinction to the Home Rule Bills of Mr. Gladstone and, a fortiori, to any more liberal schemes.