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Certainly, if Home Rule is to be refused till all the prophets of evil are refuted, Ireland must go without Home Rule for ever. “If the sky fall, we shall catch larks.” But he would be a foolish bird-catcher who waited for that contingency. And not less foolish is the statesman who sits still till every conceivable objection to his policy has been mathematically refuted in advance, and every wild prediction falsified by the event; for that would ensure his never moving at all. Sedet aeternumque sedebit. A proper enough attitude, perhaps, on the part of an eristic philosopher speculating on politics in the silent shade of academic groves, but hardly suitable for a practical politician who has to take action on one of the most burning questions of our time. Human affairs are not governed by mathematical reasoning. You cannot demonstrate the precise results of any legislative measure beforehand as you can demonstrate the course of a planet in the solar system. “Probability,” as Bishop Butler says, “is the guide of life;” and an older philosopher than Butler has warned us that to demand demonstrative proof in the sphere of contingent matter is the same kind of absurdity as to demand probable reasoning in mathematics. You cannot confute a prophet before the event; you can only disbelieve him. The advocates of Home Rule believe that their policy would in general have an exactly contrary effect to that predicted by their opponents. In truth, every act of legislation is, before experience, amenable to such destructive criticism as these critics urge against Home Rule. I have not a doubt that they could have made out an unanswerable “case” against the Great Charter at Runnymede; and they would find it easy to prove on a priori grounds that the British Constitution is one of the most absurd, mischievous, and unworkable instruments that ever issued from human brains or from the evolution of events. By their method of reasoning the Great Charter and other fundamental portions of the Constitution ought to have brought the Government of the British Empire to a deadlock long ago. Every suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, every Act of Attainder, every statute for summary trial and conviction before justices of the peace, is a violation of the fundamental article of the Constitution, which requires that no man shall be imprisoned or otherwise punished except after lawful trial by his peers.[20] Consider also the magazines of explosive materials which lie hidden in the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, if they could only be ignited by the match of an ingenious theorist. The Crown, as Lord Sherbrooke once somewhat irreverently expressed it, “can turn every cobbler in the land into a peer,” and could thus put an end, as the Duke of Wellington declared, to “the Constitution of this country.”[21] “The Crown is not bound by Act of Parliament unless named therein by special and particular words.”[22] The Crown can make peace or war without consulting Parliament, can by secret treaty saddle the nation with the most perilous obligations, and give away all such portions of the empire as do not rest on Statute. The prerogative of mercy, too, would enable an eccentric Sovereign, aided by an obsequious Minister, to open the jails and let all the convicted criminals in the land loose upon society.[22] But criticism which proves too much in effect proves nothing.

In short, every stage in the progress of constitutional reform has, in matter of fact, been marked by similar predictions falsified by results, and the prophets who condemn Home Rule have no better credentials; indeed, much worse, for they proclaim the miserable failure of “things as they are,” whereas their predecessors were in their day satisfied with things as they were.[23]

It is, high time, therefore, to call upon the opponents of Home Rule to tell us plainly where they stand. They claim a mandate from the country for their policy. They neither asked nor received a mandate to support the system of Government which prevailed in Ireland at the last election, and still less the policy of coercion which they have substituted for that system. Do they mean to go back or forward? They cannot stand still. They have already discovered that one act of repression leads to another, and they will find ere long that they have no alternative except Home Rule or the suppression of Parliamentary Government in Ireland. Men may talk lightly of the ease with which eighty-six Irish members may be kept in order in Parliament. They forget that the Irish people are behind the Irish members. How is Ireland to be governed on Parliamentary principles if the voice of her representatives is to be forcibly silenced or disregarded? Could even Yorkshire or Lancashire be governed permanently in that way? Let it be observed that we have now reached this pass, namely, that the opponents of Home Rule are opposed to the Irish members, not on any particular form of self-government for Ireland, but on any form; in other words, they resist the all but unanimous demand of Ireland for what “Unionists” of all parties declared a year ago to be a reasonable demand. No candidate at the last election ventured to ask the suffrages of any constituency as “a supporter of things as they are.” Yet that is practically the attitude now assumed by the Ministerial party, both Conservatives and Liberal Unionists. It is an attitude of which the country is getting weary, as the bye-elections have shown. But the “Unionists,” it must be admitted, are in a sore dilemma. Their strength, such as it is, lies in doing nothing for the reform of Irish Government. Their bond of union consists of nothing else but opposition to Mr. Gladstone’s policy. They dare not attempt to formulate any policy of their own, knowing well that they would go to pieces in the process. Their hope and speculation is that something may happen to remove Mr. Gladstone from the political arena before the next dissolution. But, after all, Mr. Gladstone did not create the Irish difficulty. It preceded him and will survive him, unless it is settled to the satisfaction of the Irish people before his departure. And the difficulty of the final settlement will increase with every year of delay. Nor will the difficulty be confined to Ireland. The Irish question is already reacting upon kindred, though not identical, problems in England and Scotland, and the longer it is kept open, so much the worse will it be for what are generally regarded as Conservative interests. It is not the Moderate Liberals or Conservatives who are gaining ground by the prolongation of the controversy, and the disappearance of Mr. Gladstone from the scene would have the effect of removing from the forces of extreme Radicalism a conservative influence, which his political opponents will discover when it is too late to restore it. Their regret will then be as unavailing as the lament of William of Deloraine over his fallen foe–