Home Rulers are fond of phrasing their programme as a demand on the part of Ireland that she shall control the management of her domestic affairs.

The language fits the facts like a glove.

The difference between Unionism and Home Rule is the difference between being compelled to live in an ostentatious and lonely hotel and being permitted to live in a simple, friendly house of one's own.
Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of "the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule of Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in fact to murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule.

A man who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum between Clapham and the Strand.

The old natural philosophers accepted the theory of _actio distans_, that is to say they assumed that a body could act effectively where it was not.