held the meeting of Deputy-Lieutenants he recently
convened to declare for Home Rule; if Lord Shaftesbury, three times Lord
Mayor of Belfast, had then made the speech he made at the Dublin Peace
Conference last year, nothing could have resisted the triumph of the
policy of Conciliation, and Ireland would be now in enjoyment of
responsible self-government instead of being ravaged as it is by the
savagery of a civil war, in which all the usages of modern warfare have
been ruthlessly abandoned. It is also to be deplored that Sir Horace
Plunkett, who is now the enthusiastic advocate of Dominion Home Rule
(and, indeed, believes himself to be the discoverer of it), did not,
during all the years when he could potently influence certain channels
of opinion in England, raise his voice either for the agrarian
settlement or for Home Rule and refused his support, when he was
Chairman of the Irish Convention, to Mr W.M. Murphy's well-meant efforts
to get Dominion Home Rule adopted or even discussed by the Convention.

Of course this much must be said for the Unionists who have pronounced
in favour of Home Rule within the past few years, that they could plead
fairly enough that every man like Lord Dunraven, Mr Moreton Frewen, Lord
Rossmore, Colonel Hutcheson-Poe, and Mr Lindsay Crawford, who came upon
the All-for-Ireland platform from the first, was foully assailed and
traduced and had his motives impugned by the Board of Erin bosses, and
other Unionists, more timid, naturally enough, shrank from incurring a
similar fate.

But these things are of the past, and we would turn our thoughts to
the present and the future.

The country, at the General Election of 1918, by a vote so
overwhelming as to be practically unanimous, gave the guardianship of
its national faith and honour into the keeping of Sinn Fein. This is
the dominant fact of the situation from the Irish standpoint. Other
considerations there are, but any which leave this out of account fail
to grip the vital factor which must influence our march towards a just
and durable Irish settlement. Another fact that cannot be lost sight
of is that there is a Home Rule Act on the Statute Book. With this
Southern Ireland will have nothing to do! Unionists and Nationalists
alike condemn it as a mockery of their national rights. But the
Orangeman of the Six Counties are first seriously going to work their
regional autonomy--they are going to set up their Parliament in
Belfast. And onc