ctorate had ever elected a Catholic to Parliament.

Still, it is unfortunately true that the great bulk of the landlords and
ex-landlords stand aloof from the Home Rule movement. The collateral
result is that far too many of them instinctively stand aloof even from
those purely economic and intellectual movements which tend to make a
living united Ireland out of chaos. The national loss is heavy; the
waste of talent and of driving-power, for Ireland needs driving-power
from her leisured and cultured classes, is melancholy to contemplate.

Everywhere one sees waste of talent in Ireland. The land abounds in men
with ideas and potentialities waiting for those normal chances of
development which self-governed countries provide. Much of this good
material is crushed under unnatural political tyrannies caused by
ceaseless agitation for and against an abstract aim which should have
been satisfied long ago, so that the energies it absorbed might have
been diverted into practical channels. There is too much moral
cowardice, too little bold, independent thought and action. Nobody knows
what Ireland really is, and of what she is capable. Nobody can know
until she has responsibility for her own fate.

Local government, where popular opinion is nominally free, suffers from
the absence of free central government. Is it not on the face of it
preposterous to give complete powers of local taxation and
administration to a country while withholding from it, as unsafe and
improper, central co-ordinating control? For any country but Ireland--at
any rate, in the British self-governing Colonies and the United
States--such a policy would be regarded as crazy. Still more
unreasonable is it to complain that local authorities under such a
system spend part of the energy which should be devoted wholly to local
affairs in abstract politics. I forbear from engaging in the statistical
war over the numbers of Catholics and Protestants employed and elected
by local bodies. One must remember, what Unionists sometimes forget,
that Ireland is, broadly speaking, a Roman Catholic country, and that
until thirteen years ago local administration and patronage were almost
exclusively in Protestant hands. We should naturally expect a marked
change; but, with that reminder, I prefer to appeal to the reader's
common sense. Deny national Home Rule, and give local Home Rule. What
would one expect to happen? What would have happened in any Colony? What
would Mr. Ar