ty, removing an infinitesimal part of the gross
abuses of municipal government under the ascendancy system, and it was
not till 1898 that the people at large are admitted to a full share in
county and town government. Even this step inverted the natural order of
things, for the new authorities are hampered in their work by the
incessant political agitation for the Home Rule which should have
preceded their establishment, as it preceded it in Great Britain and
Canada. Home Rule, the tried specific, was resisted, as those who read
the debates of 1886 and 1893 will recognize, on the same grounds as
Canadian Home Rule, in the same spirit, and often in terms absolutely
identical.

Was it because Ireland, unlike Canada, was "so near"? Let us reflect.
Did Durham advocate Canadian Home Rule because Canada was "so far"? On
the contrary, it was a superficial inference, drawn not merely from
Ireland, but from Scotland, and since proved to be false both in Canada
and South Africa, that made him shrink from the full application of a
philosophy which was already far in advance of the political thought and
morality of his day. Is it to be conceived that if he had lived to see
the Canadian Federation, the domestic and Imperial results of South
African Home Rule, and the consequences of seventy more years of
coercive government in Ireland, he would still have regarded the United
Kingdom in the light of a successful expedient for "compelling the
obedience of refractory populations"? In truth, Durham, like ninety-nine
out of a hundred Englishmen of his day, knew nothing of Ireland, not
even that her political system differed, as it still differs, _toto
coelo_ from that of Scotland, and came into being under circumstances
which had not the smallest analogy in Scotland. So far as his knowledge
went, he was a student of human nature as affected by political
institutions. Wakefield, who advised him, was a doctrinaire theorist who
put his preconceived principles into highly successful practice both in
Australia and Canada. They said: "Your coercive system degrades and
estranges your own fellow-citizens. Change it, and you will make them
friendly, manly, and prosperous." They were right, and one reflects once
more on the terrible significance of Mr. Chamberlain's admission in
1893, that "if Ireland had been a thousand miles away, she would have
what Canada had had for fifty years."

FOOTNOTES:

[20] "The Irishman in Canada" (N.F. Davin), a b