The Exchequer has lost little or nothing, and even at much greater cost it would be the cheapest money that England ever spent.  More than half the tenanted land has now passed to the occupiers, and it would be the most cruel injustice to leave the remaining landlords without power either to sell their property or to collect rents judicially fixed and refixed.  They would fare badly with an Irish legislature and an Irish executive.  They are, for the most part, poor but loyal men, and have exercised a great civilising influence.  Are they to be deserted and ruined to keep an English party in place by the votes of men who have never pretended to be anything but England’s enemies?

Irish Unionists laugh at the idea of a local Parliament being kept subordinate.  It will have the power of making laws for everything Irish, that is, for everything that immediately concerns those that live in Ireland.  There will be ceaseless efforts to enlarge its sphere of action, and if Irish members continue to sit at Westminster they will be as troublesome as ever there.  If there are to be no Irish members Ireland will be a separate nation.  Even candid Home Rulers confess that statutory safeguards would be of none effect.  Hedged in by British bayonets the Lord Lieutenant may exercise his veto, but upon whose advice will he do it?  If on that of an Irish Ministry the minority will have no protection at all, and does any one suppose it possible to go back to the practice of the seventeenth century, when all Irish Bills were settled in the English Privy Council, and could not be altered in a Dublin Parliament?  Orators declaim about our lost legislature, but they take good care not to say what it was.  In the penultimate decade of the eighteenth century the trammels were taken off, and a Union was soon found necessary.  During the short interval of Independence there were two French invasions and a bloody rebellion.  Protestant ascendency, though used as a catchword, is a thing long past.  Roman Catholic ascendency would be a very real thing under Home Rule.  The supremacy of the Imperial Parliament alone makes both the one and the other impossible.

If a legislature is established it must be given the means of enforcing its laws.  We do not know what the present Government propose to do with the Irish police, but whatever the law says in practice, they will be under the local executive.  Unpopular people will not be protected, and many of them will be driven out of the country.  Parliamentary Home Rulers draw rosy pictures of the future Arcadia; but they will not be able to fulfil their own prophecies.  Apart from the agrarian question, there is the party of revolutionists in Ireland whose headquarters are in America.  They have furnished the means for agitation, and will look for their reward.  The Fenian party has less power in the United States than it used to have, but there will be congenial work to do in Ireland.  A violent faction can be kept in order where there is a strong government, but in a Home Rule Ireland it would not be strong for any such purpose.  Appeals to cupidity and envy would find hearers, and there could be no effective resistance.  The French Jacobins were a minority but they swept all before them.  In the end better counsels might prevail, but the mischief done would be great, and much of it irreparable.