"No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation. No man has a right to say to his country, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.' We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall."
What the precise matter of offence may be one finds it difficult to discover. Mr Balfour very properly characterises as the utterance of a statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines to usurp the throne and sceptre of Providence. But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home Rule of the note of "finality." With the sugges
tion that Home Rule is not at all events the end of the world we are, of course, in warm agreement. But if Mr Smith has entered public affairs in pursuit of static formulæ for dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world to gratify such desires. And even if he were to go to the next, he would have to be very careful in choosing his destination, for all the theologians tell us that, in Heaven, personalities continue to grow and develop. In fact, if anybody wants "finality," I am afraid that we can only recommend him to go to Hell. As for the world, in which we live, it is a world of flux. Physicists allow the earth a long road to travel before it tumbles into dissolution, and seers and prophets of various kinds foretell an equally long cycle of development for human nature, as we now know it. The fate of all our present political combinations is doubtful, and no nation has received absolute guarantees for its future. An All-Europe State with its capital at London, a Federation of the World with its capital at Dublin, a Chinese Empire with its capital at Paris—these are all possibilities. Australia may be annexed by Japan, Canada by the United States, or vice versa; South Africa may spread northwards until it absorbs the Continent,
or shrink southwards until it expires on the point of the Cape. The Superman may, as I am informed, appear on the stage of history at any moment, and make pie of everything. And not one of these appalling possibilities disturbs Mr Smith in the least. But he is going to vote against justice for Ireland unless we can promise him that throughout all the æons, as yet unvouchsafed, and to the last syllable of recorded time, her political destiny is going to be in all details regulated by the Home Rule Bill of 1912. This is not an intelligent attitude.
Of course the real innuendo is that we in Ireland are burning to levy war on Great Britain, and would welcome any foreign invasion to that end. On these two points one is happy to be able to give assurances, or rather to state intentions. As for foreign invasion, we have had quite enough of it. It is easier to get invaders in than to get them out again, and we have not spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland for ourselves in order to make a present of it to the Germans, or the Russians, or the Man in the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever. The present plan of governing Ireland in opposition to the will of her people does indeed inevitably make that country the weak spot in the defences of these islands, for such misgovern
ment produces discontent, and discontent is the best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home Rule, and your cause instantly becomes ours. Give the Irish nation an Irish State to defend, and the task of an invader becomes very unenviable. As for levying war on Great Britain, we have no inclination in that direction. The best thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisation to war, and we have no wealth to waste on expensive stupidities of any kind. In addition we are handicapped on sea by the smallness of our official navy which, so far as I can gather, consists of the Granuaile, a pleasure-boat owned by the Congested Districts Board. In land operations, we are still more seriously hampered by the non-existence of our army. And although, in point of population, our numerical inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this slight disproportion may be regarded by an Irish Parliament as a fact not unworthy of consideration.
But we must not suffer ourselves to be detained any longer among these unrealities. A Home Rule government will be loyal to the interests of its people, and actual circumstances demand, for the behoof of Great Britain and Ireland alike, an era of peace with honour, and friendship founded on justice. The magnitude
of the commercial relations between the two countries is inadequately appreciated. Not merely is Great Britain our best customer, but we are her best customer. The trade of Great Britain with Ireland is larger than her trade with India, and nearly twice as large as that with Canada or Australia. And while these surprising figures are far from indicating the existence of a sound economic structure in Ireland, none the less, the industrial expansion that will follow Home Rule may be expected to alter the character rather than to diminish the value of the goods interchanged. For if the development of textile, leather, shipbuilding, and other manufactures lessens the British import under these heads into Ireland, it will increase that of coal, iron, steel, and machinery. And Ireland, without trenching on the needs of her home market, is capable of much more intensive exploitation as a food-exporting country. Economically the two nations are joined in relations that ought to be relations of mutual profit, were they not eternally poisoned by political oppression. With this virus removed, the natural balance of the facts of nature will spontaneously establish itself between the two countries.
The true desire of all the loud trumpeters of "loyalty" is, as it appears to me, of a very
different order. What they really ask is that Ireland should begin her career of autonomy with a formal act of self-humiliation. She may enter the Council of Empire provided that she enters on her knees, and leaves her history outside the door as a shameful burden. This is not a demand that can be conceded, or that men make on men. The open secret of Ireland is that Ireland is a nation. In days rougher than ours, when a blind and tyrannous England sought to drown the national faith of Ireland in her own blood as in a sea, there arose among our fathers men who annulled that design. We cannot undertake to cancel the names of these men from our calendar. We are no more ashamed of them than the constitutional England of modern times is ashamed of her Langtons and De Montforts, her Sidneys and Hampdens. Our attitude in their regard goes beyond the reach of prose, and no adequate poetry comes to my mind. The Irish poets have recently been so busy compiling catalogues of crime, profanity, and mania for the Abbey Theatre that they have not had time to attend to politics; and in attempting to suggest the spirit that must inform the settlement between Ireland and England, if out of it is to spring the authentic flower of loyalty, I am reluctantly compelled