This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old as the human race itself.  Of all human passions, that for political domination is the last to yield to reason.  Men are naturally inclined to attribute admitted social evils to every cause—­religion, climate, race, congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence—­rather than to the form of political institutions; in other words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty of its component parts.  If, in one case, their own experience proves them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable pretext for distinguishing the case from its predecessor.  Underlying all is a nervous terror of the abuse of freedom founded on the assumption that men will continue to act when free exactly as they acted under the demoralizing influence of coercion.  The British Empire has grown, and continues to grow, in spite of this deeply rooted political doctrine.  Ireland is peculiar only in that her proximity to the seat of power has exposed her for centuries to an application of the doctrine in its most extreme form and without any hope of escape through the merciful accidents to which more fortunate communities owe their emancipation.  Canada owes her position in the Empire, and the Empire itself exists in its present form to-day, owing to the accident that the transcendantly important principle of responsible government advocated by Lord Durham as a remedy for the anarchy and stagnation in which he found both the British and the French Provinces of Canada in 1838, did not require Imperial legislation, and was established without the Parliamentary or electoral sanction of Great Britain.  Lord Durham was derided as a visionary, and abused as unpatriotic for the assertion of this simple principle.  Far in advance of his time as he was, he himself shrank from the full application of his own lofty ideal, and consequently made one great, though under the circumstances not a capital, mistake in his diagnosis, and it was to that mistake only that Parliament gave legislative effect in 1840.  By one of the most melancholy ironies in all history Ireland was the source of his error, so that the Union of the Canadas, dissolved as a failure by the Canadians themselves in 1867, was actually based on the success of the Anglo-Irish Union in repressing a dangerous nationality.  Did the proof of the error in Canada induce Englishmen to question the soundness of the precedent on which the error was based?  On the contrary, the lesson passed unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day.  It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent statesmen the significance of the Canadian