ths of the island, fall into Nationalist hands. Their power will
be enormously increased, for they will then command the machinery of
administration, and the power of taxing. What with taxing landlords,
aiding recalcitrant tenants, stopping the wheels of any central
authority which may displease or oppose them, they will be in so strong
a position that the creation of an Irish Parliament may appear to be a
comparatively small further step, may even appear (as the wisest
Nationalists now think it would prove) in the light of a check upon the
abuse of local powers. These eventualities will unquestionably, when
English opinion has realized them, make such a Parliament as the present
pause before it commits rural local government to the Irish democracy.
But it could not refuse to do something; and if it tried to restrain
popular representative bodies by the veto of a bureaucracy in Dublin,
there would arise occasions for quarrel and irritation more serious than
now exist.[70] Those who once begin to repair an old and tottering
building are led on, little by little, into changes they did not at
starting contemplate. So it will be if once the task is undertaken of
reforming the confessedly bad and indefensible system of Irish
administration. We may stop at some half-way house on the way, but Home
Rule stands at the end of the road.

Supposing, then, that the Nationalist party, retaining its present
strength and unity, perseveres in its present demands, there is every
prospect that these demands will be granted. But will it persevere?
There are among the English Dissentients those who prophesy that it will
break up, as such parties have broken up before--will lose hope and
wither away. Or the support of the Irish peasantry may be withdrawn--a
result which some English politicians expect from a final settlement of
the land question in the interest of the tenants. Any of these
contingencies is possible, but at present most improbable. The moment
when long-cherished aims begin to seem attainable is not that at which
men are disposed to abandon them.

There are, however, other reasons which suggest the likelihood of a
change in English sentiment on the whole matter. The surprise with
which the Bill of last April was received has worn off. The alarm is
wearing off too. Those who set their teeth at what seemed to them a
surrender to the Parnellites and their Irish-American allies, having
relieved their temper by an emphatic No, hav