. The bitter proofs of mis-government shown by the
breakdown of their land system brought home to every cottager the need
of a Home Rule Government. The great agitations for land reform and
Home Rule went on side by side--sometimes taking a form of violence,
but more and more of orderly constitutional pressure--until in the
seventies there emerged at Westminster a powerful Irish Party, too
strong either for the neglect or the indifference of any British
Government.

ENGLAND'S NEED

It was impossible, indeed, for Great Britain to be indifferent, for she
had suffered almost as much as Ireland. The hostility of the Irish
Party formed a perpetual source of danger to her Governments, both
Liberal and Tory, and a chronic source of instability in her
administration. The democratic movement in England was continually
weakened by the necessity of keeping Ireland down. That necessity
largely broke the strength of the great reform movement of the
thirties. It destroyed Sir Robert Peel's Government in the forties. It
broke down the strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government in the eighties.
Ireland and Irish affairs absorbed so much of the time of the British
Parliament that the affairs of Great Britain herself were neglected.
The old free and easy ways of the British Parliament were brought to a
summary close by the obstruction of the Irish Party in the eighties,
and the modern rules of compartment closure and strict limitation of
debate were forced upon the Mother of Parliaments.

It was these consequences, quite as much as the sufferings of Ireland,
that gradually converted a great body of the British people to the
cause of Home Rule. That process was going on throughout the seventies
and the eighties, and was brought to a climax by the conversion of Mr.
Gladstone in 1886. Since then the cause which was so despised in the
days of O'Connell has had one of the great English parties behind it,
and has so steadily made its way in the favour of the British nation
that it now stands on the threshold of accomplishment.

* * * * *

What, then, emerges from this survey? It is that in returning to Home
Rule as the mode of governing Ireland we are simply going back to the
old and traditional method of Irish rule. It is also that, on surveying
the past, we find not merely that Home Rule has often saved Ireland,
but that always the wider and the more generous the form of Home Rule
the more it has helped Ire