fits the facts like a glove. The difference between Unionism and Home
Rule is the difference between being compelled to live in an
ostentatious and lonely hotel and being permitted to live in a simple,
friendly house of one's own.

Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes
the doctrine of "the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule of
Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in
fact to murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule. A man
who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily
domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs
of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum
between Clapham and the Strand. The old natural philosophers accepted
the theory of _actio distans_, that is to say they assumed that a body
could act effectively where it was not. This was Unionism in science,
and needless to say it was wrong. In politics it is equally wrong, and
it has been repudiated everywhere except in Ireland. Physical vision is
limited in range; as the distance increases the vision declines in
clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally ceases. Now you in
London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in
Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which,
according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to
say, without your eye on the object. But it is time to have done with
this stern, long chase of the obvious.

Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the
doctrine of a "stake in the country." England has, indeed, a stake in
Ireland. She has the same interest in seeing Ireland prosperous that a
bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are
good. Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the