The sole difficulty in meeting this argument is the extreme vagueness of its principal term.  The words ‘Home Rule’ are in their signification so vague, at any rate as employed by Ministerialists, that they cover governments of totally different descriptions.  Hungary, Norway, a State of the American Union, a Province of the Canadian Dominion, the Dominion itself, Man, Jersey, and Guernsey, every English colony with representative institutions, are each described, by one Gladstonian reasoner or another, as happy and prosperous under Home Rule.  But there is no one who will deny that the dissimilarities between the governments existing in each of the countries referred to are at least as striking as are their similarities; that the contrast, for example, between the relation of Hungary to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the relation of New York to the United States is at least as obvious as its likeness.  The analogy, moreover, between Home Rule in any of these countries and Home Rule in Ireland is at best distant and shadowy.[114]

The crisis is too serious to permit us to waste words in examining the curiosities of the Home Rule controversy.  Of Hungary, and its relation to the Empire of which it forms part, nothing at all will here be said.  There is nothing in that relation analogous to Irish Home Rule.  Nor need we trouble ourselves with the ‘Home Rule’ of Rhodes, of Samos, or of the Lebanon.  Of these and any other States, if such there be, which enjoy ‘Home Rule’ under the supremacy of the Sultan, all that need be said is that it is satisfactory to learn on the authority of Mr. Gladstone that any part whatever of the Turkish Empire is well governed and happy.  If any one can seriously suppose that the prosperity of Man and the Channel Islands, which reap all the benefits and bear none of the burdens of connection with Great Britain, and moreover have at no time been discontented, affords any reason for supposing that the secular miseries and discontent of Ireland will be cured by a system of government totally different from that which prevails either in Man, or Guernsey, or in Jersey, let him refer to these interesting islands.[115] For myself I shall leave them out of account.  Of the cordial relations between Sweden and Norway we hear nothing; the goodwill generated by a system of Home Rule is bringing these countries to the brink of civil war.[116]

There are two analogous cases or precedents on which serious reasoners rely in support of a policy of Home Rule for Ireland.  The success of federal government in other countries, and especially in the United States, and the success of colonial independence throughout the British Empire, are adduced as presumptions that Home Rule would knit together Great Britain and Ireland, or, as the cant of the day goes, transform a paper union into a union of hearts.  If New York be loyal to the United States, if New Zealand be loyal to the British Crown, why should not Ireland, when endowed with local independence resembling the independence of an American State or of a self-governing British colony, be a loyal member of the United Kingdom?[117]