The Framework of Home Rule by Erskine Childers
page 7 of 491 (01%)
page 7 of 491 (01%)
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the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and that is
precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet. For Ireland in many ways is painfully abnormal. The most cursory study of her institutions and social, economic, and political life demonstrate that fact. The Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and ignoring their fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a habit of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth of political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction that Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-government. In other words, he prescribes for the disease a persistent application of the very treatment which has engendered it. Whatever the result, there is a plausible answer. If Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she deserve freedom? If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it. In other words, if all that is healthy in the patient battles desperately and not in vain, first against irritant poison, and then against soporific drugs, this healthy struggle for self-preservation is attributed not to native vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive government. This train of argument, so far from being confined to Ireland, is as old as the human race itself. Of all human passions, that for political domination is the last to yield to reason. Men are naturally inclined to attribute admitted social evils to every cause--religion, climate, race, congenital defects of character, the inscrutable decrees of Divine Providence--rather than to the form of political institutions; in other words, to the organic structure of the community, and to rest the security of an Empire on any other foundation than that of the liberty of its component parts. If, in one case, their own experience proves them wrong, they will go to the strangest lengths of perversity in misreading their own experience, and they will seek every imaginable |
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