There is another aspect of the case which it would be unfair to ignore.
Opportunity is the measure of a nation's responsibility. I have no doubt
that Mr. Thomas Hughes spoke for a very respectable portion of Christian
England, in 1861, when he wrote Mr. James Russell Lowell, in a prefatory
note to "Tom Brown at Oxford," these words:

"The great tasks of the world are only laid on the strongest
shoulders. We, who have India to guide and train, who have for our
task the educating of her wretched people into free men, who feel
that the work cannot be shifted from ourselves, and must be done as
God would have it done, at the peril of England's own life, can and
do feel for you."

It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be
dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland
has always been a thorn in the side of England. And the policy towards it
could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for
authority or to win it by conciliation; it has been a strange mixture of
untimely concession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has
physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged
country, of which nothing can surely be predicted but the uncertainty of
its harvests, inhabited by a people of most peculiar mental constitution,
alien in race, temperament, and religion, having scarcely one point of
sympathy with the English. But geography settles some things in this
world, and the act of union that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom in
1800 was as much a necessity of the situation as the act of union that
obliterated the boundary line between Scotland and England in 1707. The
Irish parliament was confessedly a failure, and it is scarcely within the
possibilities that the experiment will be tried again. Irish