implicitly recognized.

It needs only a moment's consideration of Anglo-Irish history to see the
special applicability of the psychological rule to Ireland. The evils of
the Canadian Union, during the twenty-seven years of its duration, are
infinitesimal beside the mischief, moral and material, which have been
caused to both partners by the forcible amalgamation of Great Britain
and Ireland; the waste of indigenous talent, industrial and political;
the dispersion all over the globe of Irishmen; the conversion of friends
into enemies, of peaceable citizens into plotters of treason, of farmers
into criminals, of poets and statesmen into gaolbirds; the check to the
production of wealth and Anglo-Irish commerce; the dislocation and
demoralization of Parliamentary life; and, saddest results of all, the
reactionary effect upon British statesmanship, domestic and Imperial,
and the deterioration of Irish character within Ireland. The voluntary
principle--at any rate, among the English-speaking races--is as
essential to a true Union, like that of the South African Colonies or
that of Scotland and England, as to a Federation. It is a sheer
impossibility to create a perfect, mechanical Union on a basis of hatred
and coercion; witness the strangely anomalous colonial features
surviving in Irish Government--the Lord-Lieutenancy, the separate
administration, and the standing army of police.

Persons inclined to reckon the advantages, whether of Federation or of
Union, in pounds, shillings, and pence, may regard the psychological
requirement as fanciful. It is not fanciful; on the contrary, it is
related in the clearest way to the concrete facts of the situation.
Before there is any question of Federation Ireland needs to find
herself, to test her own potentialities, to prove independence of
character, thought, and action, and to discover what she can do by her
own unaided will with her own resources. As I endeavoured to show in the
last chapter, these are the true reasons for Home Rule.

Home Rule is neither a luxury nor a plaything, but a tremendously
exacting duty which must be undertaken by every country conscious of
repression and valuing its self-respect, and which Ireland is praying to
be allowed to undertake. When a people has learnt to understand the
extent of its own powers and limitations, then it can safely and
honourably co-operate on a Federal basis with other peoples, and, in the
interests of efficiency and economy,