into a real union.  Bismarck used the Prussian railways as well as the Zollverein to build up German unity.  In the making of Canada the Intercolonial railway and the Canadian Pacific were essential complements to the national tariff.  Railways forced South Africa into union, and will gradually give Australia real cohesion and unity.  In the United Kingdom there has been no national policy with regard to communications, least of all any nationally directed or stimulated effort to cement the political union of 1800.  But such a policy is essential to the reality of the Union.  To get rid, as far as possible, of the barrier which the St. George’s Channel presents to-day both to the convenience of passenger traffic and to the direct through carriage of goods between internal points in the two islands should be one of the first objects of Unionist policy in the future.  In the train-ferry, which has bridged the channels of sea-divided Denmark, which in spite of the Baltic, has made Sweden contiguous with Germany, which for the purposes of railway traffic, has practically abolished Lake Michigan, modern developments have provided us with the very instrument required.  To Irish agriculture the gain of being put into direct railway communication with all England and Scotland would be immense.  From the tourist and sporting point of view Ireland would reap a doubled and trebled harvest.  More than that, the bridging of St. George’s Channel will for the first time enable the west coast of Ireland to become what it ought to be, the true west coast of the United Kingdom, the starting point of all our fast mail and passenger services across the Atlantic.

But all this implies the Union, the existence of a single Government interested in the development of the United Kingdom as a whole.  Separate governments in Great Britain and Ireland would not have the same inducement to give financial encouragement to such schemes.  Irish manufacturers and British farmers alike might protest against being taxed to facilitate the competition of rivals in their own markets.  An Irish Government would have neither sufficient money nor sufficient interest to give the subsidies necessary to secure a three days’ service across the Atlantic.  A British Government would naturally develop one of its existing ports, or some new port on the west coast of Scotland, rather than build up a new source of revenue and national strength in a separate State.  No one could blame it, any more than we could blame the Canadian Government for wishing to subsidise a fast service from Halifax or some other port in the Dominion rather than one from St. John’s, Newfoundland.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Navigation Acts deliberately destroyed Irish shipping.  A policy of laisser faire in matters of national communication has hitherto prevented its revival.  To-day new ideas are in the air.  Those ideas can be applied, either from the standpoint of the Union or from that of separatism.  In the