rhapsody, and many of my own countrymen have thought it good strategy to accept and exploit it.  They have this to urge, indeed, that failure to make oneself understood is commonly regarded as a sign of the superior mind.  Lord Rosebery, for example, has told us that he himself, for all his honey-dropping tongue, has never been properly understood.  And Hegel, the great German philosopher, who was so great a philosopher that we may without impropriety mention his name even in the brilliant vicinage of the Earl of Midlothian, used to sigh:  “Alas! in the whole of my teaching career I had but one student who understood my system, and he mis-understood it.”  This is all very well in its way, and a climate of incomprehension may suit orators and metaphysicians admirably; but it will not do for politics.  The party or people that fails to make its programme understood is politically incompetent, and Ireland is assuredly safe from any such imputation.  She has her spiritual secrets, buried deep in what we may call the subliminal consciousness of the race, and to the disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the inspiration of a new literature.  But in politics Ireland has no secrets.  All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance.  Her political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic rectitude of the Ten Commandments.  There is no doubt about what she wants, and none about why she ought to have it.  In that sense the case for Home Rule is made, and this book, having justified its title, ought to come to an end.  But convention prescribes that about the nude contour of principles there should be cast a certain drapery of details, and such conventions are better obeyed.

Where we are to begin is another matter.  We are, as has been so often suggested, in presence of a situation in which one cannot see the trees for the forest.  The principle of the government of Ireland is so integrally wrong that it is difficult to signalise any one point in which it is more wrong than it is in any other.  A timber-chaser, that is to say a pioneer for a lumber firm, in the Western States of America once found himself out of spirits.  He decided to go out of life, and being thorough in his ways he left nothing to chance.  He set fire to his cabin, and, mounting the table, noosed his neck to a beam, drank a large quantity of poison, and, as he kicked over the table, simultaneously shot himself through the head and drew a razor across his throat.  Later on the doctor had to fill in the usual certificate.  At “Cause of Death” he paused, pondered, and at last wrote, “Causes too numerous to specify.”  The fable possesses a certain suggestive value upon which we need not enlarge.  How, one may well ask, are we to itemise the retail iniquities of a system of government which is itself a wholesale iniquity?  But since we must begin somewhere let us begin with the Economics of Unionism.

In this often-written, and perhaps over-written story there is one feature of some little comfort.  Whatever quarrel there may be as to causes, the facts are not disputed.  Pitt and his friends promised that the Union would be followed by general prosperity, development of manufacturers, and expansion of commerce.