He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only superficially right about America. In the terms of this celebrated remonstrance, as illuminated by his own private correspondence, his consistency is revealed. By the very nature of things, he maintained, the central Parliament of a great heterogeneous Empire must exercise a supreme superintending power and regulate the polity and economy of the several parts as they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the ground of expediency alone, he would certainly have applied to America. The proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and surely logic was never distorted to stranger ends. The "ordinary residence" of the threatened Irish landowners was in England, "to which country they were attached, not only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not constitute in themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish Government. They were to be "fined" for living in England, as though that fine were not the most just and politic which could be conceived, if it went even an inch towards establishing the principle that Ireland's affairs were the business of responsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further principle, enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noblemen shared in founding, that "property has its duties as well as its rights." Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon irony, the tax would lead directly to the "separation" of the two Kingdoms both in interest and affection. The Colonies would follow the Irish example, and thus a principle of disunion and separation would pervade the whole Empire; the bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it together would everywhere be loosened, and a narrow, insulated, local feeling and policy would be proportionately increased.[12] Such was Burke's Imperialism, as evoked by an Irish measure which struck at the root of a frightful social evil and of a vicious political system. But the idea expressed by Burke--the spirit of his whole argument--went far beyond this particular absentee tax or any similar tax proposed, as happened in one instance, by a Colony. It was the superbly grandiose expression, and all the more insidiously seductive in that it was so grandiose, of a principle which all thinking men now know, or ought to know, is the negation of Empire, which lost us America, which came within an ace of losing us Canada, which might well have lost us South Africa, and which has in very fact lost us, though not yet irrevocably, the "affection," to use Burke's word, of Ireland. We may call local patriotism "narrow and insulated," if we please, but we recognize now, in every case save that of Ireland, that it is the only foundation for, and the only stimulant to, Imperial patriotism.