nd and Ireland, is to argue that institutions
nominally the same will work in the same way when applied to totally
different circumstances. Victoria is prosperous; Ireland is in distress.
Victoria takes pride in the Imperial connection; the difficulty in
dealing with Ireland consists in the fact that large bodies of Irishmen
detest the British Empire. Victoria has never aspired to be a nation;
the best side of Irish discontent consists in enthusiasm for Irish
nationality. Above all this, there has never been any lasting feud
between England and her Australian dependencies; the main ground in
favour of a fundamental change in the constitutional relations of
Ireland and England is the necessity of putting an end at almost any
cost to traditional hatred and misunderstanding generated by centuries
of misgovernment and misery. If, as already pointed out, the source of
this misery, so far as it can be touched by law at all, is a vicious
system of land tenure, it is in vain to imagine that the misfortunes of
Ireland can be cured by any mere change of constitutional forms. Grant,
however, for the sake of argument, that the passion of nationality is
the true ground of the demand for Home Rule; grant, also, in defiance of
patent facts, that the autonomy of a dependency satisfies the
sensibilities of a nation; still it is idle to fancy that a system
based, like our scheme of Colonial government, on friendly
understandings and the habitual practice of compromise, can regulate the
relations of two countries which are kept apart mainly because they
cannot understand one another, and can neither of them admit the
necessity of mutual concessions. Moreover, a scheme of nominal
subjection combined with real independence has the one great defect that
it does not teach the lessons which men and nations learn by depending
on their own unassisted and uncontrolled efforts. No one learns
self-control who fancies he is controlled by a master.[49]

The scheme, in short, of Colonial independence, though less absolutely
impracticable than any form of Federalism,[50] has, as a solution of our
Irish difficulties, two fatal defects: it gives Ireland a degree of
independence more dangerous to England than would be the existence of
Ireland as a separate nation; it bestows on Ireland a kind of
self-government which presents neither the material advantages derived
from the Union, nor the possible, though hypothetical, gains which might
accrue to her from