Island, it left the smaller Island untouched.  The result of the first of these has been that Irish institutions, Irish laws, Irish forms of local government, and Irish forms of parliamentary government are necessarily of the English type.  The result of the second has been that while no sharp divisions of race exist, divisions of religion have too often taken their place; that in the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century Ireland was not the partner but the victim of English factions; and that civil war in its most brutal form, with the confiscations and penal laws which followed in its train, have fed, have indeed created, the bitter fiction that Ireland was once a “nation” whose national life has been destroyed by its more powerful neighbour.

To all this it will perhaps be replied that even if the general accuracy of the foregoing statement be admitted (and nothing about Ireland ever is admitted), it is quite irrelevant to the question of Home Rule; because what is of importance to practical statesmanship is not what did actually happen in the past, but what those who live in the present suppose to have happened.  If, therefore, to the imagination of contemporary Irishmen, Ireland appears a second Poland, statesmen must act as if the dream were fact.

In such a contention there is some element of truth.  But it must be observed in the first place that dreams, however vivid, are not eternal; and, in the second place, that while this particular dream endures it supplies a practical argument against Home Rule, the full force of which is commonly under-rated.  For what are the main constitutional dangers of creating rival Parliaments in the same State?  They are—­friction, collision of jurisdiction, and, in the end, national disintegration.  Of these, friction is scarcely to be avoided.  I doubt whether it has been wholly avoided in any State where the system, either of co-equal or of subordinate Parliaments, has been thoroughly tried.  It certainly was not avoided in the days past when Ireland had a Parliament of its own.  It is incredible that it should be avoided in the future, however elaborate be the safeguards which the draughtsman’s ingenuity can devise.  But friction, in any case inevitable, becomes a peril to every community where the rival assemblies can appeal to nationalist sentiment.  The sore gets poisoned.  What under happier conditions might be no more than a passing storm of rhetoric, forgotten as soon as ended, will gather strength with time.  The appetite for self-assertion, inherent in every assembly, and not likely to be absent from one composed of orators so brilliantly gifted as the Irish, will take the menacing form of an international quarrel.  The appeal will no longer be to precedents and statutes, but to patriotism and nationality, and the quarrel of two Parliaments will become the quarrel of two peoples.  What will it avail, when that time comes, that in 1912 the Irish leaders declared themselves content with a subordinate legislature?  It is their earlier speeches of a very different tenour that will be remembered; and it will be asked, with a logic that may well seem irresistible, by what right Irish “nationality” was ever abandoned by Irish representatives.