What is more, Ireland is in the
enjoyment of practically every liberty and every privilege that is
enjoyed by any other part of the United Kingdom, of greater liberty and
privilege than is enjoyed by Dominions which have no control of Imperial
affairs. The principle which in the case of the Colonies was applied
through separate governments has, in her case, been applied through
Union. It could only have been applied through Union in 1800. It can
only be applied through Union to-day. Railways and steamships have
strengthened the geographical and economic reasons for union;
train-ferries and aircraft will intensify them still further. Meanwhile
the political and strategical conditions of these islands in the near
future are far more likely to resemble those of the great Napoleonic
struggle than those of the Colonial Empire in its halcyon period.
In one aspect, then, the Union was the only feasible way of carrying out
the principle which underlay the successful establishment of Colonial
self-government. In another aspect it was the last step of a natural
and, indeed, inevitable process for which the history of the British
Colonies since the grant of self-government has furnished analogies in
abundance.
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