If there were no other arguments against Home Rule, the paramount
necessities of Imperial defence would demand the maintenance of the
Union. But the opposition to the proposed revolution in Ireland is based
not only on the considerations of Imperial safety, but also on those of
national honour. The historical bases of Irish nationalism have been
destroyed by the arguments summarised in this book by Mr. Fisher and Mr.
Amery. It was the existence of a separate Parliament in Dublin that made
Ireland, for so many centuries, alike a menace to English liberty and
the victim of English reprisals. Miss A.E. Murray has pointed out[1]
that experience seemed to show to British statesmen that Irish
prosperity was dangerous to English liberty. It was the absence of
direct authority over Ireland which made England so nervously anxious
to restrict Irish resources in every direction in which they might, even
indirectly, interfere with the growth of English power. Irish industries
were penalised and crippled, not from any innate perversity on the part
of English statesmen, or from any deliberate desire to ruin Ireland, but
as a natural consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic
policy of the age. The very poverty of Ireland, as expressed in the
lowness of Irish wages, was a convenient and perfectly justifiable
argument for exclusion. Mr. Amery shows that the Protestant settlers of
Ulster were penalised even more severely than the intriguing Irish
chieftains against whom they were primarily directed.

It was the consciousness of the natural result of separation that caused
the Irish Parliament, upon two separate occasions, to petition for that
union with England which was delayed for over a century. The action of
Grattan and his supporters in wresting the impossible Constitution of
1782, from the harassed and desperate English Government, began that
fatal policy of substituting political agitation for economic reform