What does it all come to?  Simply this, that Ireland under Home Rule will be most painfully like every other modern country of western civilisation.  Some Unionists think that, if they could only get rid of the Irish Party, all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.  Why then are they not Home Rulers?  For Home Rule will most assuredly get rid of the Irish Party.  It will shatter the old political combinations like a waggon-load of dynamite.  New groups will crystallise about new principles.  The future in Ireland belongs to no old fidelity:  it may belong to any new courage.

Assuredly we must not seem to suggest that, in an autonomous Ireland, public life will be all nougat, velvet, and soft music.  There will be conflicts, and vehement conflicts, for that is the way of the twentieth century, and they will no doubt centre, for the most part, about taxation and education.  But the political forces of the country will have moved into totally new formations.  One foresees plainly a vertical section of parties into Agrarian and Urban, a cross section into Labour and Capitalistic.  Each of these economic groupings is indefinitely criss-crossed by an indefinite number of antagonisms, spiritual and material.  In a situation so complicated it is idle to speculate as to the conditions of the future.  A box of bricks so large, and so multi-coloured, may be arranged and re-arranged in an infinity of architectures.  The one thing quite certain is that all the arrangements will be new.  In taxation, as I have suggested, a highly conservative policy will prevail.  In education the secularist programme, if advanced at all, will be overwhelmed by a junction of Catholic and Protestant.  For religion, to the anima naturaliter Christiana, of Ireland is not an argument but an intuition.  It seems to us as reasonable to prepare children for their moral life by excluding religion as to prepare them for their physical life by removing the most important lobe of their brains.

The only other prognostication that appears to emerge is the probable predominance in a Home Rule Ireland of the present Ulster Unionist party.  That group is likely, for many reasons, to retain its solidarity after ours has been dissipated.  Should that prove to be the case, self-government will put the balance of power on almost all great conflicts of opinion into the hands of Sir Edward Carson and his successors.  The “minority,” adroitly handled, will exploit the majority almost as effectively after Home Rule as before it.  Captain Craig will dictate terms to us not from the last ditch, but from a far more agreeable and powerful position, the Treasury Bench.  And we undertake not to grumble, for these are the chances of freedom.

CHAPTER X

AN EPILOGUE ON “LOYALTY”