themselves realise that, whatever more desirable status they may have attained, they have certainly lost that of individual freedom.  Out of their own ranks a movement has arisen to put an end altogether to Party government.  This proposal I myself believe to be futile, but its very futility testifies to the existence of an intolerable situation.  All this turns on the inadequacy of the time of the House of Commons to its business.  But the distribution of such time as there is, is a revel of ineptitudes.  It resembles the drawing of a schoolboy who has not yet learned perspective.  A stranger dropping into the Chamber will find it spending two hours in helping to determine whether Russia is to have a Czar, and the next four hours helping to determine whether Rathmines is to have, let us say, a new sewer.  The affairs of India, involving the political welfare of three hundred millions of human beings, get one day; Egypt, that test case in international ethics, has to be content with a few scattered hours.  And, despite all this, local questions are not considered at sufficient length or with sufficient knowledge.  The parish pump is close enough to spoil St Stephen’s as an Imperial Council, and yet so far away as to destroy its effectiveness as an organ of local government.

Such an assembly is clearly unfitted to function as the cerebrum of Empire.  It must be relieved of burdens which in the complexity of modern politics it is no longer able to bear.  How is this to be done?  In one way and in one way only, by leaving local business to local bodies.  But that is Home Rule, or, as the learned, envisaging the idea from another point of view, sometimes prefer to call it, Devolution.  Through the principle of autonomy, incompletely applied, the British Possessions have so far evolved.  Through the principle of autonomy, completely applied, and in no other wise, can they evolve into an ordered system worthy of the Imperial name.  This is at first blush a singular development.  Here lie Ireland and England separated by a mountain of misunderstanding.  We Irish Nationalists have for a century been trying to bore a tunnel through from one side.  And suddenly we become aware of the tapping of picks not our own, and encounter midway the tunnel which the Party of Imperial Reconstruction have driven through from the other side.  Here are all the materials for a tableau.  Justice falls on the neck of expediency.  Imperialism recognises in nationality no rebel but a son of the house.  Toryism rubs its eyes, and finds that it is Home Rule.

But, sounded to its depths, this new current of thought appears not only not eccentric but inevitable.  Ample explanation is to be found in the history of the Irish fight for self-government.  On this subject there has been in Ireland a marked evolution of ideas.  O’Connell began by demanding simple Repeal of the Union and the Restoration of Grattan’s Parliament.  But by 1844 he had advanced towards a Federal programme.