Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of a “stake in the country.”  England has, indeed, a stake in Ireland.  She has the same interest in seeing Ireland prosperous that a bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are good.  Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the other.  But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the farmer’s pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker’s own appetite, would not be improved.  If he were to insist on applying to the living cow those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather, the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots.  Generally speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind anybody else’s.  Home Rule will give England precisely this chance of sticking to her last.  To Ireland it will come with both hands full of new opportunities and new responsibilities.

To realise that the national idea in Ireland arouses an emotion, at once massive, intense, and enduring, is to understand many derivative riddles.  We are all familiar with the complaint that there is in Ireland too much politics and too little business.  Of course there is, and not only too little business but too little literature, too little philosophy, too little social effort, too little fun.  We Nationalists have grasped this better and proclaimed it more steadily than any Unionist.  There is as much truth in saying that life begins where politics end, as in saying that love begins where love-making ends.  Constitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the social drama in modern times, it is rather the prologue, or, better still, the theatre in which other ideas that move men find an arena for their conflict.  Ireland, a little exhausted by her intense efforts of the last thirty years, does assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation.  But this healing peace is itself a gift of autonomy.  A tooth-ache concentrates the whole mind on one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, and breeds profanity, which is worse.  But it is idle to tell a man with a tooth-ache that what he needs in his life is less cursing and more business.  He cannot work effectively so long as he suffers; the only way to peace is to cure the tooth-ache.  And in order to get rid of politics in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home Rule.

CHAPTER V

THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (I)

Ireland, as we have seen, has had the misfortune to provoke many worthy writers to a sad debauch of sentimentalism.  It has pleased their fancy especially to picture her as a sphinx, mysterious, elusive, inscrutable.  It is impossible to govern her, declare these theorists, because it is impossible to understand her.  She is the femme incomprise of modern politics.  Her temperament is a magnet for disaster, her soul a sanctuary of inviolable secrets.  So runs the