“ No man has proprietary rights in principles. One has no right to compromise them. One may not barter them away, may not make them the basis of a policy of give and take. To do so would be to treat them not as principles but as mere opinions. Principles are things to stand on, not things to play with as with pawns on a chessboard. He who, whilst he professes some principle of belief or conduct in religious or civil life, is ready to agree with his neighbour in the opposite shows little regard for truth and little sense of duty. ”

“ It is not true that physical happiness is the highest happiness; it is not true that physical happiness is a principle on which you can build up a flourishing and enduring commonwealth. A civilised community must rest on a large realised capital of thought and sentiment; there must be a reserved fund of public morality to draw upon in the exigencies of national life. Society has a soul as well as a body, the traditions of a nation are part of its existence. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the Irish system had sprung from the soul of a people with an intense national consciousness, that it bound the various clans under obedience to one common law, that it gave to all the inhabitants, rich and poor, learned and simple, an enthusiasm for their race and country which rooted that law in their hearts, and endowed it with a tenacity of life that no political misfortune could destroy. ”

“ Ireland has contributed to our literature her peculiar strain of humour and of romance, tinged with the melancholy of her historic ill-fortune. The graver tone and gentler view she will never lose, for they belong to a people who will always have behind them the memory of the centuries of that undeserved suffering which opens the eyes of men to the nature of the human tragedy. But the distinctive Irish quality may henceforward be shot with a brighter thread catching the light from her assured future as a nation. ”

“ The errors of a dark past cannot be undone; but each successive measure of conciliation has brought increased contentment and prosperity to the country; and, sure as there is a God in heaven, the repeal of the last and greatest wrong, an Act of Union which no honest historian can defend, will be the harbinger of lasting peace. To deal at once with the Protestant attitude to Home Rule, the Churches in an overwhelming majority stand solid against it. The opposition is confined to no class, being, if anything, more bitter and unreasoning in the lower grades of society. ”

“ The definition of a “nation” may be varied: every man has his opinion, for, as the old Irish saying went, “'tis his own head he has on him.” But in the matter nature and history cannot be wholly set aside, and we may attach some importance to the unity of a country, the persistence of its race, and the continuity of its life. If we consider outward form, who ever thinks of the map of Great Britain as a whole? The form that is in men's minds is of two configurations, one of England and one of Scotland, two countries mapped out on separate sheets. ”

“ Parliament itself is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and nearly all the things we cherish most have been imported from abroad—our racehorses and our religion, our alphabet and our algebra, our trial by jury and our vote by ballot. Pure-bred civilisations have been rare, inelastic, and unprogressive, and the test of a nation's political capacity lies not in its rigid adherence to its original stock-in-trade, but in its powers of assimilation and adaptability to its environment. ”

“ Irish Home Rule has been the touchstone of Liberalism, and it is not by any accident that Unionists, who abandoned their old creed to refuse Ireland's plea, became arrant Tories, and have ceased to exist as a political party.
The objections made by Protestants are formidable and specious. They appeal to passion rather than to reason; they exploit religion in opposition to Christianity; they ignore history and flourish on journalism; they forget humanity's claims in their zeal for sectional interests. ”

“ It is no longer a society which can be represented as honeycombed with conspiracies, or given up to disorder. It is no longer in the grip of a land system which necessitated an agrarian revolution, either as the precursor or as the first act of a self-governing Parliament. It is no longer so overtaxed that to maintain the fiscal balance with Great Britain would be to impose a permanent tribute on the smaller and poorer island. ”

“ No Protestant Church will perhaps ever be the Church of Ireland, as one powerful communion with a touch of the old arrogance claims to be; yet Protestantism may add something to the national piety and progress, nay, she may be another bulwark to the Christian faith in days of strain and stress, if she can exhibit to a naturally religious people a tangible proof of the possibility of uniting the Apostolic creed with the intellectual demands of modern progress, and in this way help to save the youth of Ireland from a desolating materialism. ”

“ Listening to the harangues against an Irish Parliament, one can only conclude that the applauding auditors regard their ancestors as fools. To have a dance on the graves of one's ancestors may be a new amusement, but it is hardly respectful to the memory of brave men whose opinions of the hurtful effects to Ireland from the Union and the loss of a legislature have been fully justified by events. ”

“ If the Unionists of Ireland sincerely desire equality and disavow ascendency in their own country, let them prove it by being willing to accept the conditions of life and legislation naturally imposed by the will of a majority, in the discussion of which they will possess and exercise a fair, or according to their ability, a preponderating degree of influence. But let them cease to demand in their country the predominance of social, political and religious ideals, natural perhaps to England and Scotland now, but alien to Ireland, and secured only by foreign, that is non-Irish, votes. ”

“ I accept the principle of Home Rule for Ireland because it is the principle of the Presbyterian Church Government applied to secular affairs; a principle which has worked well in the Colonies where there are mixed races and religions; a principle which is a fundamental one in the United States of America; a principle which, truly democratic, has proved itself the salt of social life wherever applied, and, in the case of our Colonies, has been a link binding the Colonies with hooks of steel to the British Crown. ”

“ Are Irishmen engaged in a struggle for 150 years to gain independence and the rights of men, to signalize their victory by denying civil and religious liberty to their fellows; or are a people whose own industries have been ruined in the past by legal restraints on trade, whose enterprise and efforts to establish new industries and foster old ones are being rewarded with a few gleams of prosperity, dull or wicked enough to wish to injure commercial or manufacturing triumphs in the north of which they are proud? ”

“ History has interwoven many races and they must surely learn to live together. What of French and British in Canada, or of British and Dutch in South Africa? What again of Ulster? If Ireland is a nation, does the nation include the Protestant half of Ulster or does it not? If yes, how can any of our tests of unity stand? If not, how can we recognize Ireland as one nation and not as two? ”

“ Is it sufficient to rely upon the paramount power of the Imperial Parliament to override by statute Irish legislation which may be inequitable or inexpedient, and upon the exercise of the veto of the Imperial Government? These checks are the exercise of a force majeure, which is often invidious and always difficult. Above all they are political. The exercise of them depends on the party in power in Great Britain, and as such it may excite resentment among the Irish people as an invasion of the autonomy granted to them. ”

“ To the gift of a king England added her invention of a Parliament, but the failure of Parliament in Ireland was open and flagrant; how then talk about a nation?
“There are Englishmen and Scotchmen,” says Mr. Balfour, “who really suppose that England has deprived Ireland of its own national institutions, has absorbed Ireland, which had a polity and a civilization of its own—has absorbed it in the wider sphere of British politics; and who think that a great wrong has thereby been done to a separate nationality.... It is a profound illusion. It has no basis in historical fact at all.” ”

“ As long as each class feels that its claims, even if overborne in the end, will not be rejected without [pg 365] adequate understanding and fair consideration, there exist the elements of government by consent. But a smaller nation forcibly incorporated in a larger one does not feel this. The very constitution which is the pride of its masters is the badge of its own subjection. It may have equality of franchise, but its representatives are in a permanent minority. By history, by sentiment, perhaps by religion, race, or language, it has acquired differences of tone and habit. ”

“ The drawing off of Irish talent, in fact, turns to an additional grievance in their mind. Dublin is a modern Tara; a Metropolis from which the glory has departed; and the Vice-Royalty, though it pleases some of the tradesmen, fails altogether to satisfy the people. 'In Ireland we can make no appeal to patriotism; we can have no patriotic sentiments in our school books, no patriotic emblems in our schools, because in Ireland everything patriotic is rebellious.' These were the words uttered in my hearing, not by a complaining demagogue, but by a desponding statesman. ”

“ A satirist might mock at the depth of the chief's pocket, as deep as the pocket of the Church or of the poet; but the Irish no more wanted to get rid of the chief than of the poet or the priest. In Tudor times the only way in which a chief could be absolutely alienated and divided from his people was by pledging him to the English land system and government. ”

“ You may if you like regard our present House of Commons as an Imperial Legislature stooping from time to time to the consideration of provincial business, or as a provincial Parliament rising in its moments of inspiration to the discharge of high Imperial duties. The same Parliament that has to decide to-day some small matter of purely local Irish or Scottish concern must settle a national strike to-morrow, approve the naval strategy of the Empire, or frame the constitution for a people. ”

“ The syllabus of Pius IX. condemns the principle of equality as enshrining an error not less pernicious because common; it is the vain attempt to equalise creeds incomparable with each other and radically different; such liberty is no better than liberty to err. That is the position taken up in the Papal Syllabus. But in modern times all churches, the Roman Catholic not excepted, have yielded, often insensibly and reluctantly, to the pressure of facts. The ideal condition may be domination of the church; the practical problem in adverse circumstances is how to make the best compromise. ”

“ Almost all the confusion, trouble, and crime of last century was due to the vicious absurdity of the Irish land code and to the miserable condition of the Irish tenant farmers produced thereby. That is now changed and Ireland has become a quiet and comparatively crimeless country. The danger which many foresee under a Home Government is of a different kind. It is rather that the overwhelming peasant vote may render the administration unduly parsimonious and so unwilling to place any additional burden on the owners of land that a kind of political stagnation may arise therefrom. ”

“ Had the plan succeeded it would have shown that Irish nationality was an illusion, or at best a thin and insubstantial product of a passing historical phase. In so far as it has failed it has shown that Irish nationality is a reality, deep rooted in the past, and to be reckoned with permanently in the future. In a word the test of nationality lies in history. If the life of one people can be absorbed into that of another so that free Government can proceed unimpeded, not violated by the habitual resort to “exceptional legislation,” the union is justified by the event. ”

“ Toleration coming from any other source can give no guarantee of permanence; for it begins with expediency, and ends with it. But the toleration which separates a man's sincerity from his possible errors, and which in civil life ignores the latter for the sake of the former, is founded on principle, and is above expediency or the changing combination of human affairs.
The sincerity of a man who professes tolerance of principles which he believes to be false is to be suspected; he should be taken as one who is practically indifferent to truth or error. ”

“ Is it then irreclaimable prejudice, or indifference to the obligation of principle, that makes some persons throw up their arms and raise a cry of horror when they hear that some Catholic has been excommunicated for having denied or questioned some Article of Catholic faith? What is taken as a matter of course and of common justice in every society and in every club in the country, namely that one who is false to his society and unfaithful to its rules deserves expulsion, is stigmatised as intolerance and moral tyranny in the Catholic Church. ”

“ To use the jargon of the Ascendency party, Ireland was “loyal” before the Union and “disloyal” after it. The clear moral of those chequered years for latter-day statesmen is that a responsible Executive is of more importance than a co-equal legislature, and that having granted autonomy the British Parliament and British Ministers must strive to render it a success. Pitt's Union was not partnership but subjection. The only true Union between countries so different is to be found in loyal comradeship. ”

“ To charge a people with incapacity who have never been trusted with power is the resort of stupid malice. Irishmen have vindicated before the world their fitness to fight its battles, or command its armies; as captains of industry they have led in every land, and the British Empire above all is indebted to the statesmen, proconsuls, travellers, scholars and divines that have issued from the race. ”

“ The stock argument in Belfast appears to be that in the interests of “Empire” Home Rule is impossible. Yet Ireland was under the British Crown when 42,000 volunteers were enrolled under Lord Charlemont and the Duke of Leinster to protect her shores from foreign foes; the stigma of the word “Separatist” has been repudiated by every responsible Irish statesman; and so long as Britain's naval and military power lasts, the secession of 4 millions of people within one hour's sail is an absolute impossibility, should any one desire “the dismemberment of the Empire.” ”

“ Tolerance, however, claims a place in matters of opinion. But must not one think another's opinions false if they are opposed to his own? Certainly; but, being only opinions, one has no right to claim a monopoly of certainty for one's own as against those of others. Opinions have no claim to the privilege of principles. And what is true in theory of opinions holds in practice in matters of principle. One cannot, it is true, be tolerant of principles opposed to his own; but others must not suffer at his hands because they own principles which are not his. ”