ceful means the political separation of countries
which for good and for evil have for centuries been bound together by
position and by history, is an operation so critical that in the
judgment of statesmen it involves dangers too vast for serious
contemplation.

How, lastly, to devise a scheme of Home Rule which, while giving to
Ireland as much of legislative independence as may satisfy her wants or
wishes, shall leave to England as much supremacy as may be necessary for
the prosperity of the United Kingdom, or for the continued existence of
the British Empire, is a problem which jurists would find it hard to
solve as a matter of speculative science, and which politicians may not
without reason hold to admit of no practical solution.

Yet Maintenance of the Union, Separation, Home Rule, are names which
designate the only paths open to us. To one of these three courses we
are absolutely tied down. Each path is arduous. To complain about the
nature of things is childish. The course of wisdom is obvious. We must
all of us look facts in the face. "Things and actions are what they are,
and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why then should
we desire to be deceived?"[71] We must calmly compare the advantages of
the three steep roads which lie open to the nation, and then on the
strength of this comparison determine the course which the nation is
bound to follow by motives of expediency and of justice.

Such a comparison we have already instituted:[72] its results to any
reader who assents to my train of reasoning must be obvious.

The maintenance of the Union involves at the outset a strenuous and most
regrettable conflict with the will of the majority of the Irish people.
It necessitates at once the strict enforcement of law, combined with the
resolute effort to strip law of all injustice. It may require large
pecuniary sacrifices, and it certainly will require a constancy in just
purpose which is supposed, and not without reason, to be specially
difficult to a democracy. The difficulties on the other hand which meet
us are not unprecedented, though some of them have assumed a new form.
We have some advantages unknown to our forefathers: we can, more easily
than they could, remodel the practices of the Constitution, modify the
rules of party government, or, incredible as it may seem to members of
Parliament, touch with profane hands the venerable procedure of the
House of Commons. The English democracy,