tracts it would seem that, outside the right
of full communal self-government, the cry for Home Rule is either
interested and fictitious--or when sincere--save in certain splendid
exceptions, of whom Mr. Laing is the honoured chief, and the only Home
Ruler who makes me doubt the rightness of my own conversion--it is a
mere sentimental impulse shorn of practical power and working
capacity. In any case it is a one-sided thing, leaving out of court
Ulster, the integrity of the Empire, and the obligations of historic
continuity. It is a cry that has been echoed by violence and murder,
by outrage and ruin, and that has in it one overwhelming element of
weakness--exaggeration. It is the cry at its best of enthusiasts whose
ideas of human life and governmental potentialities are too generous
for every-day practice--at its worst but another word for self. For
the men who raise it and hound on these poor dupes to their own
destruction are men who would be rulers of the country in their own
persons, or members of a Gladstonian ministry, were the Home Rule
party to come to the front. With neither section does the strength,
the glory, the integrity, and the continuance of the Empire count;
and the honour of England, like the true well-being of Ireland, is
the last thing thought of by either party. The motto of the one is:
"_Fiat justitia ruat caelum_"--of the other: "_Apres moi le deluge._"
The one abjures the necessities of statesmanship, the other the
self-restraints of patriotism. Surely the good, wholesome, working
principles of sound government lie with neither, but rather with the
steady continuance of things as they are--modified as occasion arises
and the needs of the case demand.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: Lord Hartington's statistics--and Lord Hartington is a
man whose word not his bitterest enemies have dared to question or to
doubt--are these:

1880 (No coercion) 2,585 agrarian crimes.
1881 (Partial and weak coercion) 4,439 " "
1883 (Vigorous coercion) 834 " "
1888 (Vigorous coercion) 660 " "

]

[Footnote B: Mr. Hurlbert, a Roman Catholic, an American, and a
personal friend of Mr. Davitt--all which circumstances give a special
weight to his testimony, now borne after frequent and lengthened and
recent visits to Ireland, and after close converse with men of all
classes and of all political and religious views, says in his _Ireland
under Coercio