king its way through feudal
monarchy to constitutional freedom. The second is that while the
religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly and permanently
affected the larger Island, it left the smaller Island untouched. The
result of the first of these has been that Irish institutions, Irish
laws, Irish forms of local government, and Irish forms of parliamentary
government are necessarily of the English type. The result of the second
has been that while no sharp divisions of race exist, divisions of
religion have too often taken their place; that in the constitutional
struggles of the seventeenth century Ireland was not the partner but the
victim of English factions; and that civil war in its most brutal form,
with the confiscations and penal laws which followed in its train, have
fed, have indeed created, the bitter fiction that Ireland was once a
"nation" whose national life has been destroyed by its more powerful
neighbour.

To all this it will perhaps be replied that even if the general accuracy
of the foregoing statement be admitted (and nothing about Ireland ever
_is_ admitted), it is quite irrelevant to the question of Home Rule;
because what is of importance to practical statesmanship is not what did
actually happen in the past, but what those who live in the present
suppose to have happened. If, therefore, to the imagination of
contemporary Irishmen, Ireland appears a second Poland, statesmen must
act as if the dream were fact.

In such a contention there is some element of truth. But it must be
observed in the first place that dreams, however vivid, are not eternal;
and, in the second place, that while this particular dream endures it
supplies a practical argument against Home Rule, the full force of which
is commonly under-rated. For what are the main constitutional dangers of
creating rival Parliaments in the same State? They are--friction,
collision of jurisdiction, and, in the end, national disintegration. Of
these, friction is scarcely to be avoided. I doubt whether it has been
wholly avoided in any State where the system, either of co-equal or of
subordinate Parliaments, has been thoroughly tried. It certainly was not
avoided in the days past when Ireland had a Parliament of its own. It is
incredible that it should be avoided in the future, however elaborate be
the safeguards which the draughtsman's ingenuity can devise. But
friction, in any case inevitable, becomes a peril to every communit