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Ireland, progressive only by dint of extraordinary native exertions.
Read the Durham report on the condition of the Canadas during the long
agitation for Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of
things. The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract
and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissipate their
energies on minor ends. Yet they, too, are liable to irrational and
painful divisions, like that which divides Mr. O'Brien from Mr. Redmond;
symptoms of irritation in the body politic, not of political sanity.
They cannot prove their powers of constructive statesmanship, because
they are not given the power to construct or the responsibility which
evokes statesmanship. The anti-Home Rule partisans degenerate into
violent but equally sincere upholders of a pure negation.

Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties will, it is
to be hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and practical field for
their abilities in a free Ireland. But the parties, as such, will
disappear, on condition that the measure of Home Rule given to Ireland
is adequate. On that point I shall have more to say later. If it is
adequate, and Irish politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics,
the structure of the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense
advantage both of Ireland--including the Protestant sections of
Ulster--and of Great Britain. At present both parties, divided normally
by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain limited purposes of Irish
legislation, but both are, in different degrees and ways, sterile. The
policy of the Nationalist party has been positive in the past, because
it wrung from Parliament the land legislation which saved a perishing
society. It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule,
which is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland. More,
the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied to no other
party in the United Kingdom. Its Members accept no offices or titles,
the ordinary prizes of political life. But they themselves could not
contend that they are truly representative of three-quarters of Ireland
in any other sense than that they are Home Rulers. Half of the wit,
brains, and eloquence of their best men runs to waste. Some of them are
merely nominated by the party machine, to represent, not local needs,
but a paramount principle which the electors insist rightly on setting
above immediate loca