The experience of 1782 would be repeated.  Resistance to Ireland’s demands for extended powers would bring about war between the two countries.  In the striking phrase of Mr. Balfour’s arresting article, “The battle of the two Parliaments would become the battle of the two peoples.”  It is only necessary to refer briefly to the fact that the active section of the Nationalist party has continually and consistently opposed recruiting for the British Army.  It is perfectly certain that, under Home Rule, this policy would be accentuated rather than reversed.  We now draw recruits from Ireland out of all proportion to its population.  Under Home Rule, the difficulties of maintaining a proper standard of men and efficiency must be immensely increased.

If there were no other arguments against Home Rule, the paramount necessities of Imperial defence would demand the maintenance of the Union.  But the opposition to the proposed revolution in Ireland is based not only on the considerations of Imperial safety, but also on those of national honour.  The historical bases of Irish nationalism have been destroyed by the arguments summarised in this book by Mr. Fisher and Mr. Amery.  It was the existence of a separate Parliament in Dublin that made Ireland, for so many centuries, alike a menace to English liberty and the victim of English reprisals.  Miss A.E.  Murray has pointed out[1] that experience seemed to show to British statesmen that Irish prosperity was dangerous to English liberty.  It was the absence of direct authority over Ireland which made England so nervously anxious to restrict Irish resources in every direction in which they might, even indirectly, interfere with the growth of English power.  Irish industries were penalised and crippled, not from any innate perversity on the part of English statesmen, or from any deliberate desire to ruin Ireland, but as a natural consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic policy of the age.  The very poverty of Ireland, as expressed in the lowness of Irish wages, was a convenient and perfectly justifiable argument for exclusion.  Mr. Amery shows that the Protestant settlers of Ulster were penalised even more severely than the intriguing Irish chieftains against whom they were primarily directed.

It was the consciousness of the natural result of separation that caused the Irish Parliament, upon two separate occasions, to petition for that union with England which was delayed for over a century.  The action of Grattan and his supporters in wresting the impossible Constitution of 1782, from the harassed and desperate English Government, began that fatal policy of substituting political agitation for economic reform which has ever since marred the Irish Nationalist movement.  John Fitzgibbon[2] pointed out in the Irish House of Commons that only two alternatives lay before his country—­Separation or Union.  Under Separation an Irish Parliament might be able to pursue an economic policy of its own; under Union the common economic policy of the two countries might be adjusted to the peculiar interests of each.