“Let us look to those two countries, neither of them very large, but yet countries which every Englishman and every Scotchman must rejoice to claim his kin—­I mean the Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Norway.  Immediately after the great war the Norwegians were ready to take sword in hand to prevent their coming under the domination of Sweden.  But the Powers of Europe undertook the settlement of that question, and they united those countries upon a footing of strict legislative independence and co-equality....  And yet with two countries so united, what has been the effect?  Not discord, not convulsions, not danger to peace, not hatred, not aversion, but a constantly growing sympathy; and every man who knows their condition knows that I speak the truth when I say that in every year that passes the Norwegians and the Swedes are more and more feeling themselves to be the children of a common country, united by a tie which never is to be broken.”

The tie was broken within twenty years.

It may be that the Nationalist leaders, or some of them, do not desire separation; but it by no means follows that a concession of their demands would not lead to that result.  Franklin, in 1774, had an interview with Chatham, in which he says—­

“I assured him that, having more than once travelled almost from one end of the continent (of America) to the other, and kept a great variety of company, eating, drinking, and conversing with them freely, I never had heard in any conversation from any person, drunk or sober, the least expression of a wish for a separation, or a hint that such a thing would be advantageous to America."[29]

And yet independence came within ten years.

In the case of the United Kingdom there is no need to consider in detail how serious would be the effects—­naval, military, and economic—­of separation, for the gravity of such a contingency is admitted by all.  Admiral Mahan, the American naval expert, writes that—­

“the ambition of the Irish separatists, realised, might be even more threatening to the national life of Great Britain than the secession of the South was to that of the American Union....  The instrument for such action in the shape of an independent Parliament could not safely be trusted even to avowed friends.”

Some Home Rulers are able to—­

     “rise superior to the philosophy, as fallacious in fact as it is
     base and cowardly in purpose, which sets the safety of a great
     nation above the happiness and prosperity of a small one,"[30]

but to less lofty souls it appears that the safety of the nation is paramount, and that upon it depends the prosperity of each of its component parts.