outright, or else it must interest them in getting the terms
of its land settlement accepted and respected. Home Rule on our scheme
was, among other things, part of an arrangement for "settling the
agrarian feud." It was a means of interposing between the Irish tenant
and the British State an authority interested enough and strong enough
to cause the bargain to be kept. It is said that the Irish authority
would have had neither interest nor strength enough to resist the forces
making for repudiation. Would those forces be any less irresistible if
the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase _minus_
Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the
British State? This is a question that our opponents cannot evade, any
more than they can evade that other question, which lies unnoticed at
the back of all solutions of the problem by way of peasant
ownership--Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed
over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and
directly by Englishmen? Such a divorce is conceivable under a rule like
that of the British in India: with popular institutions it is
inconceivable and impossible.

5. It is argued that Home Rule on Mr. Gladstone's plan would not work,
because it follows in some respects the colonial system, whereas the
conditions at the root of the success of the system in the Colonies do
not exist in Ireland. They are distant, Ireland is near; they are
prosperous, Ireland is poor; they are proud of the connection with
England, Ireland resents it. But the question is not whether the
conditions are identical with those of any colony; it is enough if in
themselves they seem to promise a certain basis for government. It might
justly be contended that proximity is a more favourable condition than
distance; without it there could not be that close and constant
intercommunication which binds the material interests of Ireland to
those of Great Britain, and so provides the surest guarantee for union.
If Ireland were suddenly to find herself as far off as Canada, then
indeed one might be very sorry to answer for the Union. Again, though
Ireland has to bear her share of the prevailing depression in the chief
branch of her production, it is a great mistake to suppose that outside
of the margin of chronic wretchedness in the west and south-west, the
condition not only of the manufacturing industries of the north, but of
the agricu