ons are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality.
It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a
veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid
foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of
education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not
to lift them up. In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil
rights of freemen. Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane
tradition of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts
to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack
wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path. The
Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.

It will be observed that we are getting on. A nation so busy with
realities will have no time to waste on civil war. _Inter leges arma
silent_. But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of
the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament. Problems with a far heavier
fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. The democratic
group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of
the future, has long since declared that, to it, Home Rule would be a
barren counter-sense unless it meant the redemption of the back streets.
The Titanic conflict between what is called capital and what is called
labour, shaking the pillars of our modern Society, has not passed
Ireland by like the unregarded wind. We can no longer think of ourselves
as insulated from the world, immune from strikes, Socialists, and
Syndicalism. The problems of labour have got to be faced. But will they
be solved by a grapple between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians? It is obvious that under their pressure the old order
must change, yielding place to a new. Every Trade Union has already
bridged the Boyne. Every strike has already torn the Orange Flag and the
Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them together again after a new
and portentous pattern.

What does it all come to? Simply this, that Ireland under Home Rule will
be most painfully like every other modern country of western
civilisation. Some Unionists think that, if they could only get rid of
the Irish Party, all would be for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Why then are they not Home Rulers? For Home Rule will most
assuredly get rid of the Irish Party. It will shatter the old political
combination