Much of these historical chapters is but melancholy reading. But it is for Englishmen to remember these things, as it will be, I hope and pray, for Irishmen to forget them.
The third part of the book comes nearer home. At a time when our fellow-subjects across the oceans are repudiating, as Irishmen have repudiated, the name of “colonists,” with all its suggestions of the dependent tenure of Roman law, and are claiming, as Irishmen long ago claimed, the status of a “dominion,” it does not lie with Englishmen, least of all of the Imperialist school, to challenge the claims of the Irishmen of to-day to nationality. Professor Hobhouse reminds us that where this stubborn non-conformity to the ruling order endures, it must be accepted as the touchstone of nationalism. But the Irish demands are reinforced by English exigencies, and, as three Liberal Members of Parliament remind us, the Imperial Legislature is already disintegrating domestically under the stress of its manifold burdens. Not for the first time is the path of justice thus discovered to be also the path of expediency.
In the later chapters of this book will be found a view of the present state of Ireland, from the pens of those best qualified to speak of it, the pens of men who have spent their lives in ministering to her people. I would commend to the attention of the reader those chapters, in which a great dignitary of the Roman Church, a distinguished scholar of the Church of Ireland, and [pg iv] two members of Nonconformist bodies, who stand high in their respective communions, pray for the deliverance of the social life of their country from the obsession of a busy and alien fanaticism.
Dea magna, dea Cybelle, dea domina Dindymi,
Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo:
Alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.
It must be understood that the responsibility for each chapter is confined to the person who wrote it. We are all united in a common allegiance to the principles of Home Rule, but that allegiance is not incompatible with some diversity of view as to the form which it should take. It seems to me that the book gains, rather than loses, in value by this degree of latitude of opinion. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that the order in which the chapters appear makes no pretence to anything so invidious as an order of merit—otherwise the first chapter would have been the last; it is designed simply with a view to a logical sequence.
I wish to thank Lord Haldane and Mr. Birrell for the enjoyment of certain privileges in the preparation of the book, without the concession of which its appearance at this moment would have been impossible. I have also to thank Lord Haldane for reading the proofs of my own chapter on the Government of Ireland Bill, and giving me the benefit of that profound learning which is always so generously placed at the service of the student who seeks its guidance. To my friends, Lord Fitzmaurice, Mrs. J. R. Green, and Mr. J. A. Spender, I am indebted for many kind offices of a [pg v] diplomatic character. Throughout the conduct of my editorial task I have had the wise counsel and unfailing support of Mr. Bourchier Hawksley, the Chairman of the Home Rule Committee of the Eighty Club, and to him I desire to express my grateful acknowledgments.