The only reservation was that trade and transport between Ireland
and Great Britain—Ireland's best customer—should be kept as free as possible. The States of the American Union enjoyed no such rights. The Government considered that these facts completely fulfilled the Irish wish for " government by the consent of the governed." That principle, after all, had been first developed in England, and was the very life of the British Commonwealth. The Irish people could not be invited to take their place in the British Commonwealth on any other terms. The demand that Ireland should be treated as " a separate sovereign power " was one which " no British Govern- ment, whatever its complexion, can ever accept." Such a claim had been explicitly denounced by the famous national leaders of Ireland—Grattan, Daniel O'Connell, Thomas Davis, Parnell and Redmond. The quotations from O'Connell and Thomas Davis were extraordinarily apposite and telling.
