Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, always frank and fearless in his political
judgments, gave the best answer in 1893, when opposing the first reading
of the second of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills. "Does anybody doubt,"
he said, "that if Ireland were a thousand miles away from England she
would not have been long before this a self-governing Colony?" Now this
was not a barren geographical truism, which might by way of hypothesis
be applied in identical terms to any fraction of the United
Kingdom--say, for example, to that part of England lying south of the
Thames. Mr. Chamberlain never made any attempt to deny--no one with the
smallest knowledge of history could have denied--that Ireland, though
only sixty miles away from England, was less like England than any of
the self-governing Colonies then attached to the Crown, possessing
distinct national characteristics which entitled her, in theory at any
rate, to demand, not merely colonial, but national autonomy. On the
contrary, Mr. Chamberlain went out of his way to argue, with all the
force and fire of an accomplished debater, that the Bill was a highly
dangerous measure precisely because, while granting Ireland a measure of
autonomy, it denied her some of the elementary powers, not only of
colonial, but of national States; for instance, the full control over
taxation, which all self-governing Colonies possessed, and the control
over foreign policy, which is a national attribute. The complementary
step in his argument was that, although nominally withheld by statute,
these fuller powers would be forcibly usurped by the future Irish
Government through the leverage offered by a subordinate Legislature and
Executive, and that, once grasped, they would be used to the injury of
Great Britain and the minority in Ireland. Ireland ("a fearful danger")
might arm, ally herself with France, and, while submitting the
Protestant minority to cruel persecution, would retain enough national
unity to smite Britain hip and thigh, and so avenge the wrong of ages.