nt, and contrived constitutions for them which they conceived
must inevitably lead to separation, appeal now to the effect of those
very constitutions in drawing the Empire closer together, as a reason
why a similar method should be immediately adopted to heal the
differences between Great Britain and Ireland. New converts to any
belief, political or theological, are proverbially zealous, and perhaps
in this instance they are over-hasty. It does not follow that because
people of the same race and character are drawn together by equality and
liberty, people of different races and different characters, who have
quarrelled for centuries, will be similarly attracted to one another.
Yet so far as our own colonies are concerned it is clear that the
abandonment by the mother country of all pretence to interfere in their
internal management has removed the only cause which could possibly have
created a desire for independence. We cannot, even if we wish it
ourselves, shake off connections who cost us nothing and themselves
refuse to be divided. Politicians may quarrel; the democracies have
refused to quarrel; and the result of the wide extension of the suffrage
throughout the Empire has been to show that being one the British people
everywhere intend to remain one. With the same blood, the same
language, the same habits, the same traditions, they do not mean to be
shattered into dishonoured fragments. All of us, wherever we are, can
best manage our own affairs within our own limits; yet local spheres of
self-management can revolve round a common centre while there is a
centripetal power sufficient to hold them; and so long as England 'to
herself is true' and continues worthy of her ancient reputation, there
are no causes working visibly above the political horizon which are
likely to induce our self-governed colonies to take wing and leave us.
The strain will come with the next great war. During peace these
colonies have only experienced the advantage of union with us. They will
then have to share our dangers, and may ask why they are to be involved
in quarrels which are not of their own making. How they will act then
only experience can tell; and that there is any doubt about it is a
sufficient answer to those rapid statesmen who would rush at once into
the application of the same principle to countries whose continuance
with us is vital to our own safety, whom we cannot part with though they
were to demand it at the cannon's mo