"
It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be
dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland
has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards it
could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for
authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture of
untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has
physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged
country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty of
its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental constitution,
alien in race, temperament, and religion, having scarcely one point of
sympathy with the English. But geography settles some things in this
world, and the act of union that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom in
1800 was as much a necessity of the situation as the act of union that
obliterated the boundary line between Scotland and England in 1707. The
Irish parliament was confessedly a failure, and it is scarcely within the
possibilities that the experiment will be tried again. Irish
independence, so far as English consent is concerned, and until England's
power is utterly broken, is a dream.
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