w allocated to Ireland.[44]

The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that it has
laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian crime has
disappeared and material prosperity has greatly increased. Government in
the interests of a small favoured class has almost vanished. It survives
to this extent, that civil administration and patronage, which are
still, be it remembered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact,
in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether
disproportionate to the distribution of creeds, classes, and opinions.
And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of the
Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by seventeen out of the
thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in the House of Lords by an
overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous. But
within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional
privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords,
which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent.
The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral
power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even
strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly,
and through the final abolition of tithes, its baneful and irritating
interference with economic life. The successive measures of land
legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland
from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of
1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the
country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political
privileges of the landlord class.

Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past. What has
taken its place? What is the ruling power within Ireland? Is it a public
opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and
taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties? Is thought
free? Has merit its reward? Is there any unity of national purpose,
transcending party divisions? If it were necessary to give a categorical
"Yes" or "No" to these questions, the answer would be "No." Sane
energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public
opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without
Home Rule. It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the
face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvell