ey saw at once how
absolutely it menaced their position--how completely it embodied in
substance the main principle of the constitutional movement since the
days of Parnell--namely, the control of purely Irish affairs by an Irish
assembly subject to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament. From
debates which followed in the House of Lords (17th February 1905) it
became clear that the new movement had no sinister origin--that it was
honestly conceived and honestly intended for Ireland's national
advantage. But the Irish, whether of North or South, are a people to
whom suspiciousness in politics is a sort of second nature. It is the
inheritance of centuries of betrayals, treacheries and
duplicities--broken treaties, crude diplomacies and shattered faiths.
And thus we had a Unionist Attorney-General (now Lord Atkinson) asking
"whether the Devolution scheme is not the price secretly arranged to be
paid for Nationalist acquiescence in the settlement of the Land Question
on gracious terms"; and _The Times_ declaring (1st September 1904):
"What the Dunraven Devolution policy amounts to is nothing more nor less
than the revival in a slightly weakened and thinly disguised form of Mr
Gladstone's fatal enterprise of 1886"; whilst on the other hand those
Irish Nationalists who followed Mr Dillon's lead attacked the new
movement with a ferocity that was as stupid as it was criminal. For at
least it did not require any unusual degree of political intelligence to
postulate that if _The Times_, Sir Edward Carson, _The Northern Whig_
and other Unionist and Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the
Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists
should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of
destruction and became the abject tools of their insensate hate. Sir
Edward Carson wrote that, much as he detested the former proposals of
Home Rule, he preferred them to "the insidious scheme put forward by the
so-called Reform Association." So incorrigibly foolish were the attacks
of Mr Dillon and his friends on the Reform Association that Lord
Rathmore was able to say in the House of Lords: "Not only did the
Unionist Party in Ireland denounce the Dunraven scheme as worse than the
Home Rule of Mr Gladstone, but their language was mild in comparison to
the language of contempt which a great many of the Irish Nationalist
patriots showered upon the proposals of the noble earl."

It is the mournful tra