ut the distribution of such time as there is, is a revel of
ineptitudes. It resembles the drawing of a schoolboy who has not yet
learned perspective. A stranger dropping into the Chamber will find it
spending two hours in helping to determine whether Russia is to have a
Czar, and the next four hours helping to determine whether Rathmines is
to have, let us say, a new sewer. The affairs of India, involving the
political welfare of three hundred millions of human beings, get one
day; Egypt, that test case in international ethics, has to be content
with a few scattered hours. And, despite all this, local questions are
not considered at sufficient length or with sufficient knowledge. The
parish pump is close enough to spoil St Stephen's as an Imperial
Council, and yet so far away as to destroy its effectiveness as an organ
of local government.

Such an assembly is clearly unfitted to function as the cerebrum of
Empire. It must be relieved of burdens which in the complexity of modern
politics it is no longer able to bear. How is this to be done? In one
way and in one way only, by leaving local business to local bodies. But
that is Home Rule, or, as the learned, envisaging the idea from another
point of view, sometimes prefer to call it, Devolution. Through the
principle of autonomy, incompletely applied, the British Possessions
have so far evolved. Through the principle of autonomy, completely
applied, and in no other wise, can they evolve into an ordered system
worthy of the Imperial name. This is at first blush a singular
development. Here lie Ireland and England separated by a mountain of
misunderstanding. We Irish Nationalists have for a century been trying
to bore a tunnel through from one side. And suddenly we become aware of
the tapping of picks not our own, and encounter midway the tunnel which
the Party of Imperial Reconstruction have driven through from the other
side. Here are all the materials for a _tableau_. Justice falls on the
neck of expediency. Imperialism recognises in nationality no rebel but a
son of the house. Toryism rubs its eyes, and finds that it is Home Rule.

But, sounded to its depths, this new current of thought appears not only
not eccentric but inevitable. Ample explanation is to be found in the
history of the Irish fight for self-government. On this subject there
has been in Ireland a marked evolution of ideas. O'Connell began by
demanding simple Repeal of the Union and the Restoration of Gra