detested.  We should have manufactured sedition, lawlessness, and discord.  Then the tendency would have been strong to follow the old Irish precedent, and make the evil symptoms we had ourselves educed the pretext for tightening the screw of anti-popular government.  It would have been said that we must sustain our prestige to the end and at all costs, a phrase which often cloaks the obstinacy of moral cowardice.  Or, too late to escape the contempt of the Boers, we might have abruptly surrendered to clamour.  It would have taken a long time to reach union then.  Contempt is a bad foundation.

It brings one near despair to see the Union of South Africa used by men who should know better as an argument against Irish Home Rule.  The chain of causation is so clear, one would think, as to be incapable of misconstruction.  But there seems to be no limit in certain minds to the prejudice against the principle of Home Rule.  If it is seen to work well, the phenomenon is hurriedly swept into oblivion, and its results attributed with feverish ingenuity to any cause but the true one.  The very speed with which the antidote pervades the body politic and expels the old poison helps these untiring propagators of error to suppress the history of recuperation, and to ascribe the cure of the patient to a treatment which, if applied long enough, would have killed him.  The Conservative party appear to have now reached this amazing conclusion:  that they and Lord Milner were the authors of the South African Union, and that that Union is a weapon sent them by Providence for combating the Irish claims.  This is what Ireland has to pay for being the sport of British parties.  Individual statesmen may point at past mistakes; but a party, as a party, can never admit error:  it is against the rules.  To make things easier, there is that question-begging phrase, the “Union.”  If South Africa, like Australia, had been federalized, this windfall would have been lost, because the word “Federal” might have suggested some form of Federal Home Rule for Ireland.  Labels mean an enormous amount in politics.

There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Walter Long, and even Lord Selborne, who, as High Commissioner, actually witnessed the whole evolution from responsible government in the two conquered States to the Union of South Africa, are perfectly sincere in their opposition to Irish Home Rule.  But, I would respectfully suggest, it is their duty to use their knowledge and convictions in the right and fair way.  Let them say, if they will, ignoring the intermediate and indispensable phase of Home Rule in South Africa:  “Here are two Unions; never mind how they arose.  Both are good:  all Unions are good.  The modern tendency to unify is sound; do not let us react to devolution.”  Let them, in other words, confine their argument to the domain of political science.  What, I submit, they should refrain from, is the imputation of sordid motives to Nationalist leaders, the prognostications of religious and racial tyranny in Ireland, and all those inflammatory arguments against the principle of Home Rule which have been used all the world over, from time immemorial, for the maintenance of Unions based on legal, not on moral, ties, which were used against responsible government for the Transvaal, and which, I venture to affirm, degrade our public life.