The national idea, then, is the foundation of the “case for Home Rule.”  It might indeed be styled the whole case, but this anthem of nationality may be transposed into many keys.  Translated into terms of ethics it becomes that noble epigram of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman’s for which I would exchange a whole library of Gladstonian eloquence:  “Good government is no substitute for self-government.”  In Ireland we have enjoyed neither.  Political subjection has mildewed our destiny, leaf and stem.  But were it not so, had we increased in wealth like Egypt, in population like Poland, the vital argument for autonomy would be neither weaker nor stronger.  Rich or poor, a man must be master of his own fate.  Poor or rich, a nation must be captain of her own soul.  In the suburban road in which you live there are probably at least a hundred other house-holds.  Now if you were all, each suppressing his individuality, to club together you could build in place of the brick-boxes in which you live a magnificent phalanstery.  There you could have more air for your lungs and more art for your soul, a spacious and a gracious life, cheaper washing, cheaper food, and a royal kitchen.  But you will not do it.  Why?  Because it profiteth a man nothing to gain the services of a Paris maitre d’hotel and to lose his own soul.  In an attic fourteen feet by seven, which he can call his own, a man has room to breathe; in a Renaissance palace, controlled by a committee on which he is in a permanent minority of one, he has no room to breathe.  Home Rulers are fond of phrasing their programme as a demand on the part of Ireland that she shall control the management of her domestic affairs.  The language fits the facts like a glove.  The difference between Unionism and Home Rule is the difference between being compelled to live in an ostentatious and lonely hotel and being permitted to live in a simple, friendly house of one’s own.

Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of “the man on the spot.”  That is the Eleven Rule of Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in fact to murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule.  A man who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum between Clapham and the Strand.  The old natural philosophers accepted the theory of actio distans, that is to say they assumed that a body could act effectively where it was not.  This was Unionism in science, and needless to say it was wrong.  In politics it is equally wrong, and it has been repudiated everywhere except in Ireland.  Physical vision is limited in range; as the distance increases the vision declines in clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally ceases.  Now you in London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in Dublin.  You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which, according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to say, without your eye on the object.  But it is time to have done with this stern, long chase of the obvious.