he nation? These are Sphinx
questions, which one may be excused from endeavouring to answer, seeing
that the strongest and most far-reaching heads are at this moment intent
upon them--not, so far as can be seen, with any strikingly successful
result. The Future is a deep mine, and we have not yet struck even a
spade into it.

In every controversy, no matter how fierce the waves, how thick the air
with contending assertions, there is almost always, however, some fact,
or some few facts, which seem to rise like rocks out of the turmoil, and
obstinately refuse to be washed or whittled away. The chief of these, in
this case, is the geographical position, or rather juxtaposition, of the
two islands. Set before a stranger to the whole Irish problem--if so
favoured an individual exists upon the habitable globe--a map of the
British islands, and ask him whether it seems to him inevitable that
they should remain for ever united, and we can scarcely doubt that his
reply would be in the affirmative. This being so, we have at least it
will be said one fact, one sea-rock high above the reach of waves or
spray. But Irishmen have been declared by a great and certainly not an
unfavourable critic--Mr. Matthew Arnold--to be "eternal rebels against
the despotism of fact." If this is so--and who upon the Irish side of
the channel can wholly and absolutely deny the assertion?--then our one
poor standing-point is plucked from under our feet, and we are all
abroad upon the waves again. Will Home Rule or would Home Rule, it has
been asked, recognize this fact as one of the immutable ones, or would
it sooner or later incline to think that with a little determination, a
little manipulation, the so-called fact would politely cease to be a
fact at all? It is difficult to say, and until an answer is definitely
received it does not perhaps argue any specially sloth-like clinging to
the known in preference to the unknown to admit that there is for
ordinary minds some slight craning at the fence, some not altogether
unnatural alarm as to the ground that is to be found on the other side
of it. "Well, how do you feel about Home Rule now that it seems to be
really coming?" some one inquired last spring, of an humble but
life-long Nationalist. "'Deed, sir, to tell the truth, I feel as if I'd
been calling for the moon all me life and was told it was coming down
this evening into me back garden!" was the answer. It is not until a
great change is actually on