The settlement has since been celebrated at a demonstration of
brotherhood by the Irish Americans of New York with only six casualties.
Henceforth the Irish question passes into history. There may be some odd
fighting along the Ulster border, or a little civil war with perhaps
a little revolution every now and then, but as a question the thing is
finished.

I must say that I for one am very sorry to think that the Irish question
is gone. We shall miss it greatly. Debating societies which have
flourished on it ever since 1886 will be wrecked for want of it. Dinner
parties will now lose half the sparkle of their conversation. It will be
no longer possible to make use of such good old remarks as, "After all
the Irish are a gifted people," or, "You must remember that fifty per
cent of the great English generals were Irish."

The settlement turned out to be a very simple affair. Ireland was merely
given dominion status. What that is, no one knows, but it means that the
Irish have now got it and that they sink from the high place that they
had in the white light of publicity to the level of the Canadians or the
New Zealanders.

Whether it is quite a proper thing to settle trouble by conferring
dominion status on it, is open to question. It is a practice that is
bound to spread. It is rumoured that it is now contemplated to confer
dominion status upon the Borough of Poplar and on the Cambridge
undergraduates. It is even understood that at the recent disarmament
conference England offered to confer dominion status on the United
States. President Harding would assuredly have accepted it at once but
for the protest of Mr. Briand, who claimed that any such offer must be
accompanied by a permission to increase the French fire-brigade by fifty
per cent.

It is lamentable, too, that at the very same moment when the Irish
question was extinguished, the Naval Question which had lasted for
nearly fifty years was absolutely obliterated by disarmament. Henceforth
the alarm of invasion is a thing of the past and the navy practically
needless. Beyond keeping a fleet in the North Sea and one on the
Mediterranean, and maintaining a patrol all round the rim of the Pacific
Ocean, Britain will cease to be a naval power. A mere annual expenditure
of fifty million pounds sterling will suffice for such thin pretence of
naval preparedness as a disarmed nation will have to maintain.

This thing too, came as a surprise, or at least a surprise to