will deepen and endure. Our earnest
prayer is that God will graciously vouchsafe prosperity, happiness and
peace to all our neighbors and like blessings to all the peoples and
powers of earth.

FOOTNOTE:

[42] His last speech, delivered at the Buffalo Exposition, September 5,
1901.

IRISH HOME RULE[43]

WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE

I may without impropriety remind the House that the voices which usually
pleaded the cause of Irish self-government in Irish affairs have within
these walls during the last seven years been almost entirely mute. I
return therefore to the period of 1886, when a proposition of this kind
was submitted on the part of the government, and I beg to remind the
House of the position then taken up by all the promoters of these
measures. We said that we had arrived at a point in our transactions
with Ireland where the two roads parted. "You have," we said, "to choose
one or the other." One is the way of Irish autonomy according to the
conceptions I have just referred to, the other is the way of coercion.

What has been the result of the dilemma as it was then put forward on
this side of the House and repelled by the other? Has our contention
that the choice lay between autonomy and coercion been justified or not?
What has become of each and all of these important schemes for giving
Ireland self-government in provinces and giving her even a central
establishment in Dublin with limited powers? All vanished into thin
air, but the reality remains. The roads were still there, autonomy or
coercion. The choice lay between them, and the choice made was to repel
autonomy and embrace coercion.

In 1886 for the first time coercion was imposed on Ireland in the shape
of a permanent law added to the statute book. This state of things
constituted an offense against the harmony and traditions of
self-government. It was a distinct and violent breach of the promise on
the faith of which union was obtained. The permanent system of
repression inflicted upon the country a state of things which could not
continue to exist. It was impossible to bring the inhabitants of the
country under coercion into sympathy with the coercion power.

It was then prophesied confidently that Irishmen would take their places
in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, but it has been my honored destiny
to sit in Cabinet with no less than sixty to seventy statesmen, of whom
only one, the Duke of Wellington, was an Irishman, while Castlerea