one country is
destined to become independent of another it is better for each not to
experience the disappointment and the heartburning which accompany a
period of unwilling connection.

This is the result of the comparison we have instituted between the
three possible courses open to England. If the comparison be just the
conclusion to which its leads is obvious. The maintenance of the Union
is at this moment to England a matter of duty even more than of
interest. If the time should come when the effort to maintain the unity
of the State is too great for the power of Great Britain, or the only
means by which it is found maintainable are measures clearly repugnant
to the humanity or the justice or the democratic principles of the
English people,--if it should turn out that after every effort to
enforce just laws by just methods our justice itself, from whatever
cause, remains hateful to the mass of the Irish people,--then it will be
clear that the Union must for the sake of England, no less than of
Ireland, come to an end. The alternative policy will then be not Home
Rule but Separation. We shall save the unity at the expense of lessening
the territory of the State; we shall escape self-reproach because having
reached the limit of our powers we shall also have filled up the measure
of our obligations. But if (as there is every reason to suppose)
agrarian misery is the source of Irish discontent, and agrarian misery
springs in part from bad administration, and in part from the law
governing the tenure of land; if, in general terms, the undoubted ills
of Ireland are curable by justice, even though justice proceed from the
Parliament of the United Kingdom--an assembly, be it noted, in which the
voice of Ireland is freely heard--then there is no need to indulge in
speculations, always dangerous, upon a possible remedy which may never
be necessary, and which, while the inhabitants of England and Ireland
are still fellow-citizens of one State, it is painful even to
contemplate. On the whole, then, it appears that whatever changes or
calamities the future may have in store, the maintenance of the Union is
at this day the one sound policy for England to pursue. It is sound
because it is expedient; it is sound because it is just.

[Sidenote: Character of England's case]

This is the case of England against Home Rule; it is a case which,
however feebly stated--and I may well have failed to state it with
force--is founded on a