113
The Case from Analogy.

CHAPTER X.
HOME RULE FINANCE 125

APPENDICES.

A. The Home Rule Bill of 1912 143
B. The Shrinkage of Ireland 160
C. The Act of Union 163
D. The Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 167
E. The Irish Board of Agriculture 184
F. The Reduction in Irish Pauperism 186
G. The Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881 187
H. The Congested Districts Board 188
J. Irish Canals and Railways 190
K. Home Rule Parliaments in the British Empire 191

THE HOME RULE CASE

THE CASE THAT DOES NOT CHANGE

i.--THE SEA.
ii.--THE RACE.
iii.--THE CREED.

"Ireland hears the ocean protesting against Separation, but she
hears the sea likewise protesting against Union. She follows
her physical destination and obeys the dispensations of
Providence."

GRATTAN
(First speech against the Union 15th January, 1800).

CHAPTER I.

THE HOME RULE CASE

Very nearly a generation of time has elapsed since, in 1886, Mr.
Gladstone expounded in the British House of Commons his first Bill for
restoring to Ireland a Home Rule Parliament. Nearly twenty years have
passed since that same great man, indomitably defying age and
infirmities in the pursuit of his great ideal, passed the second Home
Rule Bill (1893) through the British House of Commons. That Bill stands
to-day unshaken in regard to all its vital clauses. Some of us still
hold the faith that that Bill would, if it had become law in 1893, have
saved Ireland from many years of wastage, and would have built up, to
face our enemies in the gate, a stronger and stouter fabric of Empire.

The Bill of 1893 only survived the perilous tempests of the House of
Commons[1] to fall a victim to the House of Lords.[2]

Nearly twenty years have elapsed since that day, and now the successors
of Mr. Gladstone, the Progressives of the United Kingdom, Liberals,
Labour Members and Nationalists, approach the same task with the Bill
of 1912.[3] Some of them are veterans of the former strife. They can
turn, like the present writer, to the thumbed diaries of that great
co