. WALTER LONG, M.P.

The argument so often and so plausibly presented in favour of Home Rule,
which urges that the Imperial Parliament is overburdened with local
affairs, contains an element of truth. It would, however, be more in
accordance with the facts to put the case the other way round: for
localities are much more seriously inconvenienced in certain respects by
the necessity of referring local business to the Imperial Parliament,
than the Imperial Parliament is inconvenienced by the transaction of
such business, which, if we are to believe the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, it neglects (vide _Nash's Magazine_, February, 1912). At the
same time, to affirm that, in order to remedy what is no more than a
defect in administration, it is necessary to overturn the British
Constitution, and to build on its ruins four semi-independent
Legislatures and one supreme Parliament, is merely to exemplify the
cynical imposture of partisan misrepresentation: what Mr. Balfour
described as "the dream of political idiots."

There is no impartial person who does not clearly recognise that to
constitute a separate Parliament for Ireland (to say nothing of England,
Wales, and Scotland) must necessarily result, not in the more efficient
despatch of legislative and administrative business, but in perpetual
friction, clogging the mechanism alike of the subordinate and the
predominate body. Ireland enjoyed--or endured--an independent Parliament
during eighteen years, from 1782 to 1800; and, in the result, the
greatest statesmen both in Ireland and in England were forced to
acknowledge that the system had in practice failed utterly; and that
there remained no alternative but the Union. To that view of the
situation the great majority of the Irish people, irrespective of race
or creed, were converted within a year before the passing of the Act, an
event which was hailed with rejoicing. The experience of 112 years,
fraught as they have been with occasional calamity and burdened with
many blunders, has not produced a single valid objection to the
principle of the Union, unless the survival among a diminishing section
of the population of the old, bad tradition of hatred towards England,
and its deliberate exploitation by pledge-bound politicians, is to be
regarded as a reason for sacrificing the welfare and the prosperity of
both countries.

The framers of the Act of Union did not, and indeed could not, provide
for every contingency. It is