mbat,[4] and can recall the great scenes of that prolonged
Parliamentary agony with a sense of treading again some well-worn road.
Others are new to the issue, and can only hear, like "horns of Elf-land
faintly blowing," some faint echo from the dawn of consciousness.

But young or old, we must again set forth on our travels, and this
time--

"It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles."

It will be the memory of the "Great Achilles" that will sustain us. For
this task comes to Liberals as a sacred trust from Mr. Gladstone. It is
from him that they have learnt that race-hatred is poison, and that the
only true union between nations is--in a phrase that has outlived the
silly laughter of the shallow--the "Union of Hearts."[5] It is Mr.
Gladstone's work that they design to accomplish. It is the memory of
his passionate and sustained devotion through the last twenty years of
that glorious life that has thrown a halo round this cause, and still
gilds it with a "heavenly alchemy."

But, before we "smite the sounding furrows," our first duty is to
survey once more the seas over which we shall have to voyage. We have
to consider again both the old and the new "case for Home Rule"--not
merely the case of 1886 or 1893, but the still stronger case of 1912.

For the world never stands still, and in every generation every great
human problem presents different aspects, and shows new lights and
shadows. Every great human question is like a great mountain which on a
second or third visit reveals new and unsuspected depths and heights,
new valleys and new peaks, slopes which new avalanches have furrowed,
and glaciers which have receded or advanced.

Not that the real, great, main outline ever changes. As with the
mountains, so with the great human problems; there are always certain
great features which remain permanent.

THE SEA

There are, for instance, in the Irish case the sixty-five miles of sea
which, since the earliest dawn of human memory, have divided Ireland
from Great Britain. A fact absurdly simple and obvious, but the
greatest feature of all in this mighty problem of human government!

"The sea forbids Union, and the Channel forbids Separation." There is
no change in that great physical condition. Those sixty-five miles of
sea have neither increased nor diminished since 1893. That sea is still
too broad for "Union"--in the Parliamentary sense of that word--and too
narrow for Separation.

To anyone standing