he dual government of Ireland by two Parliaments,
one sitting in Dublin and one in London, contemplated in the Home Rule
Act, would be impossible and irritating. Whatever may be said for two
bodies each with their spheres of influence clearly defined, there
is nothing to be said for two legislatures with concurrent powers of
legislation and taxation, and with members from Ireland retained at
Westminster to provide some kind of democratic excuse for the exercise
of powers of Irish legislation and taxation by the Parliament at
Westminster. The Irish demand is that Great Britain shall throw upon our
shoulders the full weight of responsibility for the management of our
own affairs, so that we can only blame ourselves and our political
guides and not Great Britain if we err in our policies.

17. I have stated what I believe to be sound reasons for the recognition
of the justice of the Irish demand by Great Britain and I now turn to
Ulster, and ask it whether the unstable condition of things in Ireland
does not affect it even more than Great Britain. If it persists in its
present attitude, if it remains out of a self-governing Ireland, it will
not thereby exempt itself from political, social and economic trouble.
Ireland will regard the six Ulster counties as the French have regarded
Alsace-Lorraine, whose hopes of reconquest turned Europe into an armed
camp, with the endless suspicions, secret treaties, military and naval
developments, the expense of maintaining huge armies, and finally the
inevitable war. So sure as Ulster remains out, so surely will it become
a focus for nationalist designs. I say nothing of the injury to the
great wholesale business carried on from its capital city throughout the
rest of Ireland where the inevitable and logical answer of merchants
in the rest of Ireland to requests for orders will be: "You would die
rather than live in the same political house with us. We will die rather
than trade with you." There will be lamentably and inevitably a fiercer
tone between North and South. Everything that happens in one quarter
will be distorted in the other. Each will lie about the other. The
materials will exist more than before for civil commotion, and this
will be aided by the powerful minority of Nationalists in the excluded
counties working in conjunction with their allies across the border.
Nothing was ever gained in life by hatred; nothing good ever came of
it or could come of it; and the first and m