Again, India offers to the young and the adventurous a career, military, civil, or commercial.  This is of great weight—­great social weight.  One of the chief wants of England today is careers and professions for her sons.  The population of the United Kingdom in 1876 was estimated at near thirty-four millions; in the last few decades the decennial increase had been considerably over two millions; at that rate the population in 1900 would be near forty millions.  How can they live in their narrow limits?  They must emigrate, go for good, or seek employment and means of wealth in some such vast field as India.  Take away India now, and you cut off the career of hundreds of thousands of young Englishmen, and the hope of tens of thousands of households.

There is another aspect of the case which it would be unfair to ignore.  Opportunity is the measure of a nation’s responsibility.  I have no doubt that Mr. Thomas Hughes spoke for a very respectable portion of Christian England, in 1861, when he wrote Mr. James Russell Lowell, in a prefatory note to “Tom Brown at Oxford,” these words: 

“The great tasks of the world are only laid on the strongest shoulders.  We, who have India to guide and train, who have for our task the educating of her wretched people into free men, who feel that the work cannot be shifted from ourselves, and must be done as God would have it done, at the peril of England’s own life, can and do feel for you.”

It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home.  Ireland has always been a thorn in the side of England.  And the policy towards it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture of untimely concession and untimely cruelty.  The problem, in fact, has physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable.  A water-logged country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty of its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental constitution, alien in race, temperament, and religion, having scarcely one point of sympathy with the English.  But geography settles some things in this world, and the act of union that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom in 1800 was as much a necessity of the situation as the act of union that obliterated the boundary line between Scotland and England in 1707.  The Irish parliament was confessedly a failure, and it is scarcely within the possibilities that the experiment will be tried again.  Irish independence, so far as English consent is concerned, and until England’s power is utterly broken, is a dream.  Great changes will doubtless be made in the tenure and transfer of land, and these changes will react upon England to the ultimate abasement of the landed aristocracy; but this equalization of conditions would work no consent to separation.  The undeniable growth of the democratic spirit in