Now you in
London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in
Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which,
according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to
say, without your eye on the object. But it is time to have done with
this stern, long chase of the obvious.
Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the
doctrine of a "stake in the country." England has, indeed, a stake in
Ireland. She has the same interest in seeing Ireland prosperous that a
bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are
good. Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the
other. But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the
farmer's pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker's own appetite, would
not be improved. If he were to insist on applying to the living cow
those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather,
the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots. Generally
speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind
anybody else's.
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