Their tirades have been received with open arms by the Orangemen as affording a weapon in the division of their common enemy, by which may be maintained that de facto, if not de jure, ascendancy, which in spite of the ballot, the extended franchise, and local government, persists in Ireland.  But, on the other hand, as has been well said, the fact is not lost on the great bulk of the Irish people that it is from the Sinn Fein section—­the little coterie which professes to stand for every sort of idealism—­that all the imputations and innuendoes have come.

This extreme school, of course, will in no sense be pleased by ameliorative legislation as applied by this or any other Government, because the worse England treats Ireland the stronger will be their position, and every concession gained by the country is so much ground cut from under their feet; but the policy of refusing all attempts at piecemeal improvement, on the ground that a complete reversal of the existing system is called for, may be magnificent, and on this there must be two opinions, but it is not practical politics which will commend itself to the ordinary Irishman.  “Men,” wrote Edmund Burke more than a hundred years ago, “do not live upon blotted paper; the favourable or the unfavourable mind of the rulers is of more consequence to a nation than the black letter of any statute.”  Irish people are not likely to fail to realise this, and the experience of the past is such as to show that remedial legislation has been powerless to stay the National demand, and concessions, so far from putting a period to the appeals of the people for the control of their own affairs, have rather increased the vehemence of their demand, for with democracy, as with most things, l’appetit vient en mangeant.

As against the body which we have been considering one hears people speaking of the liberal school of Unionists—­the rise of which is so marked a product of recent years in Ireland—­as a body who represent the moderate section of opinion, the demands of which are reasonable and comprise all that the Liberal Party can be expected to concede; and among this section of recent writers on Irish politics three stand out prominently by reason of their position and of their proposals:—­Mr. T.W.  Russell, in “Ireland and the Empire,” preached with cogent force the need for the last step in the expropriation of the Irish landlords, the one great obstacle, in his eyes, to a prosperous and contented Ireland.  In the economic field Sir Horace Plunkett has pleaded, in “Ireland in the New Century,” for the salvation of the Irish race by the development of industries; while in the political sphere Lord Dunraven, in “The Outlook in Ireland,” has urged the pressing need for the closer association of Irishmen with the government of their own country.  I am not concerned to deny the remarkable fact which these volumes indicate in the change of view on the part of three representative Protestant and Unionist Irishmen; but in this connection two things, on which sufficient stress has not so far been laid, must be recalled.  In the first place the members of what is called the middle party are recruits not from Nationalism but from Unionism; it is some of the members of the latter party who have abated their vehemence, and not any of those of the former who have altered their orientation in respect of great democratic principles.