The fate of the Home Rule Bill of 1893 was already assured long before it left the House of Commons.  Like the Bill of 1886 it came to grief on the fear of the English Unionists for the unity of the Empire.  Home Rule was conquered by Imperialism, and the Ulster opposition was merely used as a powerful and effective argument in the campaign.

Ireland had sunk meanwhile into a hopeless stupor.  The attitude of the Irish masses appeared to be one of despairing indifference to all the parties whose several newspapers were daily engaged in the delectable task of hurling anathemas at each other’s heads.  Interest in the national cause had almost completely ebbed away.  A Liberal Chief Secretary, in the person of Mr John Morley, reigned in Dublin Castle, but all that he is remembered for now is that he started the innovation of placing Nationalist and Catholic Justices of the Peace on the bench, who became known in time as “the Morley magistrates.”  Otherwise he left Dublin Castle as formidable a fortress of ascendancy authority as it had ever been.  Under conditions as they were then, or as they are now, no Chief Secretary can hope to fundamentally alter the power of the Castle.  “Imagine,” writes M. Paul Dubois in Contemporary Ireland:  “the situation of a Chief Secretary newly appointed to his most difficult office.  He comes to Ireland full of prejudices and preconceptions, and, like most Englishmen, excessively ignorant of Irish conditions....  It does not take him long to discover that he is completely in the hands of his functionaries.  His Parliamentary duties keep him in London for six or eight months of the year, and he is forced to accept his information on current affairs in Ireland from the permanent officials of the Castle, without having even an opportunity of verifying it, and to rely on their recommendations in making appointments.  The representative of Ireland in England and of England in Ireland he is ‘an embarrassed phantom’ doomed to be swept away by the first gust of political change.  The last twenty years, indeed, have seen thirteen chief secretaries come and go!  With or against his will he is a close prisoner of the irresponsible coterie which forms the inner circle of Irish administration.  Even a change of Government in England is not a change of Government in Ireland.  The Chief Secretary goes, but the permanent officials remain.  The case of the clock is changed, but the mechanism continues as before....  The Irish oligarchy has retained its supremacy in the Castle.  Dislodged elsewhere it still holds the central fortress of Irish administration and will continue to hold it until the concession of autonomy to Ireland enables the country to re-mould its administrative system on national and democratic lines.”