The great fact about this religious situation in Ireland, therefore, is that you have a Catholic country with a strong Protestant minority.

We are asked to believe that this presents an insuperable obstacle to the gift of self-government. But Ireland does not stand alone in this respect. There are many other countries in the world where the same difficulty has been faced and overcome. Take the German Empire. It has included since 1870 the great state of Bavaria, where the great struggle of the Reformation ended with honours divided. Modern Bavaria contains a population which, according to the Religious Census of December 1st, 1905, is thus divided:—

Roman Catholics4,600,000
Protestant1,844,000
Jews55,000

Strangely enough, the proportions are almost precisely the same as in Ireland. But this state of affairs has not prevented the German Empire from leaving to Bavaria, not merely a king and parliament, but also an army subject to purely Bavarian control in time of peace, and a separate system of posts, telegraphs, and state railways.[11] Are we to say that trust and tolerance are German virtues, unknown to the British people?

But they are not unknown to the British people. Our own colonists have set us a better example. Canada has a far more difficult religious problem than Great Britain. She has two provinces side by side—Quebec and Ontario—both with the same religious problem as Ireland. In both there are strong religious minorities. Quebec is predominantly Catholic, and Ontario is predominantly Protestant. Thus:—

Quebec—
Catholics1,429,000
Protestant189,000
Ontario—
Protestants1,626,000
Catholics390,000

How is this problem solved? Why, by Home Rule. For a long time—from 1840 to 1887—Canada made the experiment of governing these two provinces under one Parliament and from one centre. That experiment never succeeded. As long as they were under one government, the minority in each of these provinces insisted on appealing for help to the majority in the other. There arose the evil of "Ascendancy "—the government of a majority by a minority. At last the Canadians faced the problem. In 1867 they divided the provinces, and gave them each a Home Rule government of their own, subject to the Dominion Parliament. Since then there has been no more trouble about Ascendancy. Quebec and Ontario now settle their own affairs, including Education and all other local matters, and no one ever hears anything about the ill-treatment of minorities.

So much, then, for the permanent factors—Sea, Race, and Religion. There is no insuperable obstacle there. Rather it is here—in these great dominating facts—that the strongest argument for Home Rule must ever be found. For it is those things that constitute nationality.

The real difficulties in the way of Home Rule were found, both in 1886 and 1893, not in these permanent things, but in the changing facets of human laws. It was the Land Question that in all the speeches of 1886 provided the strongest argument. It was the absence of local government, and the presumed incapacity for local government, that filled so many Unionist speeches. It was the quarrel over University Education that provided the best evidence of incompatibility of temper between Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant.

I shall show that in all these respects the problem has completely and radically changed since 1893.