simple,
friendly house of one's own.

Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes
the doctrine of "the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule of
Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in
fact to murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule. A man
who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily
domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs
of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum
between Clapham and the Strand. The old natural philosophers accepted
the theory of _actio distans_, that is to say they assumed that a body
could act effectively where it was not. This was Unionism in science,
and needless to say it was wrong. In politics it is equally wrong, and
it has been repudiated everywhere except in Ireland. Physical vision is
limited in range; as the distance increases the vision declines in
clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally ceases. Now you in
London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in
Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which,
according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to
say, without your eye on the object. But it is time to have done with
this stern, long chase of the obvious.

Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the
doctrine of a "stake in the country." England has, indeed, a stake in
Ireland. She has the same interest in seeing Ireland prosperous that a
bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are
good. Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the
other. But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the
farmer's pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker's own appetite, would
not be improved. If he were to insist on applying to the living cow
those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather,
the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots. Generally
speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind
anybody else's. Home Rule will give England precisely this chance of
sticking to her last. To Ireland it will come with both hands full of
new opportunities and new responsibilities.

To realise that the national idea in Ireland arouses an emotion, at once
massive, intense, and enduring, is to understand many derivative
riddles. We are all familiar with the