l?

As for the risk to Great Britain, I have only this last word to say: Let
her people, not for the first time, show that they can rise superior to
the philosophy, as fallacious in effect as it is base and cowardly in
purpose, which sets the safety of a great nation above the happiness and
prosperity of a small one. Within the last few weeks the wheel has
turned full circle, and the almost inexplicable contradiction which has
existed for so long between Unionism and Imperialism has been
illuminated with a frank cynicism rare in our public life. It is being
said that the freedom given to Canada cannot be given to Ireland,
because the separation from the Empire theoretically rendered possible
by such a step would be immaterial in the case of Canada, which is
distant, but perilous in the case of Ireland, which is near. If this be
Imperialism, it should stink in the nostrils of every decent citizen at
home and abroad.

It is true, to our shame, that, by little more than an accident, Canada
obtained the freedom which gave her people harmony, energy, and wealth
in the teeth of this mean and selfish doctrine. But Lord Durham took a
higher view. Let me recall the memorable words which he added to his
long and brilliant argument for liberty as a source, not only of
domestic regeneration, but of affection and loyalty to the Motherland:
"_But at any rate our first duty is to secure the well-being of our
colonial countrymen;_ and if, in the hidden decrees of that wisdom by
which this world is ruled, it is written that these countries are not
for ever to remain portions of the Empire, we owe it to our honour to
take good care that, when they separate from us, they should not be the
only countries on the American continent in which the Anglo-Saxon race
shall be found unfit to govern itself."

Lord Durham was doubly right; in his prophecy of the closer union
liberty would promote, and in elementary law which he laid down, of
moral obligation which, whatever the result, he held superior to
dynastic calculations. It is a fact of ominous significance that the
intellectual successors of the men who most hotly repudiated both these
doctrines in 1838 are being driven by pressure of their Irish views to
revive that repudiation in 1911, and to revive it in the midst of the
most effusive protestations of the need for still closer union with a
Colony which would either have undergone the fate of Ireland or have
ceased to be a member of the