The Case Against Home Rule PDF Download

Excerpt from The Case Against Home Rule For the third time in less than a generation a Liberal Government is about to introduce a Home Rule Bill. The actual provisions of the measure will not be known for some weeks. But there is no reasonable doubt that it will be substantially the same measure as that introduced in 1886 or in 1893. That is to say, it will be a Bill to hand over the "peace, order, and good government" of Ireland to the Nationalist Party, subject to certain restrictions and safeguards. Those restrictions will, apparently, include the control of the Irish Customs and Excise by the Imperial Parliament, and, no doubt, most of the other matters reserved from the purview of the Irish Parliament by the two previous Bills, e.g., foreign affairs, defence, external trade, coinage, copyright, patents, and possibly posts. The safeguards, whatever precise form they may take on paper, will resolve themselves in practice into the power of the Imperial Parliament to enforce its own wishes or the decisions of the Privy Council by armed force. This much has already been made clear by Mr. Churchill's Belfast speech, from which we can further conclude that some Irish members will be kept at Westminster; that there will be no Irish contribution to Imperial expenditure; but that, on the contrary, Irish land purchase and Irish old-age pensions are to be paid for by the taxpayers of Great Britain. There may be other minor variations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.