I can hear in imagination the sniff of the unimaginative reader; I can figure to myself his instant dismissal of all these considerations as "sentiment." Let the word stand, coloured though it is with associations that degrade it. But is "sentiment" to be ignored in the fixing of constitutions? Ruskin asks a pertinent question. What is it after all but "sentiment," he inquires, that prevents a man from killing his grandmother in time of hunger? Sentiment is the most respectable thing in human psychology. No one believes in it more thoroughly than your reactionary Tory. But he wears his heart on his sleeve with a difference. He is so greedily patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism in the world to himself. That he should love his country is natural and noble, a theme so high as to be worthy of Mr Kipling or even Mr Alfred Austin himself. That we should love ours is a sort of middle term between treason
and insanity. It is as if a lover were to insist that no poems should be written to any woman except his mistress. It is as if he were to put the Coercion Act in force against anyone found shedding tears over the sufferings of any mother except his mother. In fact it is the sort of domineering thick-headedness that never fails to produce disloyalty.
The national idea, then, is the foundation of the "case for Home Rule." It might indeed be styled the whole case, but this anthem of nationality may be transposed into many keys. Translated into terms of ethics it becomes that noble epigram of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman's for which I would exchange a whole library of Gladstonian eloquence: "Good government is no substitute for self-government." In Ireland we have enjoyed neither. Political subjection has mildewed our destiny, leaf and stem. But were it not so, had we increased in wealth like Egypt, in population like Poland, the vital argument for autonomy would be neither weaker nor stronger. Rich or poor, a man must be master of his own fate. Poor or rich, a nation must be captain of her own soul. In the suburban road in which you live there are probably at least a hundred other house-holds. Now if you were all, each suppressing
his individuality, to club together you could build in place of the brick-boxes in which you live a magnificent phalanstery. There you could have more air for your lungs and more art for your soul, a spacious and a gracious life, cheaper washing, cheaper food, and a royal kitchen. But you will not do it. Why? Because it profiteth a man nothing to gain the services of a Paris maître d'hôtel and to lose his own soul. In an attic fourteen feet by seven, which he can call his own, a man has room to breathe; in a Renaissance palace, controlled by a committee on which he is in a permanent minority of one, he has no room to breathe. Home Rulers are fond of phrasing their programme as a demand on the part of Ireland that she shall control the management of her domestic affairs. The language fits the facts like a glove. The difference between Unionism and Home Rule is the difference between being compelled to live in an ostentatious and lonely hotel and being permitted to live in a simple, friendly house of one's own.
Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of "the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule of Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in fact to murder,
as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule. A man who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum between Clapham and the Strand. The old natural philosophers accepted the theory of actio distans, that is to say they assumed that a body could act effectively where it was not. This was Unionism in science, and needless to say it was wrong. In politics it is equally wrong, and it has been repudiated everywhere except in Ireland. Physical vision is limited in range; as the distance increases the vision declines in clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally ceases. Now you in London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which, according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to say, without your eye on the object. But it is time to have done with this stern, long chase of the obvious.
Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of a "stake in the country." England has, indeed, a stake in Ireland. She has the same interest
in seeing Ireland prosperous that a bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are good. Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the other. But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the farmer's pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker's own appetite, would not be improved. If he were to insist on applying to the living cow those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather, the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots. Generally speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind anybody else's. Home Rule will give England precisely this chance of sticking to her last. To Ireland it will come with both hands full of new opportunities and new responsibilities.
To realise that the national idea in Ireland arouses an emotion, at once massive, intense, and enduring, is to understand many derivative riddles. We are all familiar with the complaint that there is in Ireland too much politics and too little business. Of course there is, and not only too little business but too little literature, too little philosophy, too little social effort, too little fun. We Nationalists have grasped this better and proclaimed it more steadily than any Unionist. There is as much truth in saying
that life begins where politics end, as in saying that love begins where love-making ends. Constitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the social drama in modern times, it is rather the prologue, or, better still, the theatre in which other ideas that move men find an arena for their conflict. Ireland, a little exhausted by her intense efforts of the last thirty years, does assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation. But this healing peace is itself a gift of autonomy. A tooth-ache concentrates the whole mind on one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, and breeds profanity, which is worse. But it is idle to tell a man with a tooth-ache that what he needs in his life is less cursing and more business. He cannot work effectively so long as he suffers; the only way to peace is to cure the tooth-ache. And in order to get rid of politics in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home Rule.