nals of the League are strong because their
decisions commend themselves to the traditional feeling of the people.
But the doubtful hypothesis and the undoubted fact, though one or other
of them lies at the basis of all the strongest arguments in favour of
Home Rule, each invalidate almost as much as they support the contention
that an Irish Parliament will prove the specific for the diseases (due
in the first instance to the original vice of the connection between
England and Ireland) under which Irish society now suffers. If the
passion of nationality is the cause of the malady, then the proposed
cure is useless, for Home Rule will not turn the people of Ireland into
a nation. If a vicious system of land tenure is the cause of
lawlessness, then the restoration or re-creation of an Irish Parliament
is needless, for the Parliament of the United Kingdom can reform, and
ought to reform, the land system of Ireland, and ought to be able to
carry through a final settlement of agrarian disputes with less
injustice to individuals than could any Parliament sitting at Dublin.

Reasoning, however, which fails to establish the expediency of creating
an Irish Parliament may prove, and in fact does amply prove, that the
task of maintaining peace order and freedom in Ireland is at the present
juncture a matter of supreme difficulty. Any possible course, moreover,
open to English statesmanship involves gigantic inconvenience, not to
say tremendous perils. A man involved practically in the conduct of
public affairs may easily bring himself to believe that the policy which
he recommends is not only the best possible under the circumstances, but
is also open to no serious objection. Outsiders, who in this matter are
better because more impartial judges than the ablest of politicians,
know that this is not so. We have nothing before us but a choice of
difficulties or of evils. Every course is open to valid criticism.

The maintenance of the Union must necessarily turn out as severe a task
as ever taxed a nation's energies, for to maintain the Treaty of Union
with any good effect means that while refusing to accede to the wishes
of millions of Irishmen, we must sedulously do justice to every fair
demand from Ireland, must strenuously and without either fear or favour
assert the equal rights of landlords and tenants, of Protestants and
Catholics, and must at the same time put down every outrage and reform
every abuse.

To carry out by pea