To my own party in Ireland then, I would first direct the reader’s attention.  I have already referred to the deplorable effects produced upon national life by the exclusion of representatives of the landlord and the industrial classes from positions of leadership and trust over four-fifths of the country.  I cannot conceive of a prosperous Ireland in which the influence of these leaders is restricted within its present bounds.  It has been so restricted because the Irish Unionist party has failed to produce a policy which could attract, at any rate, moderate men from the other side, and we have, therefore, to consider why we have so failed.  Until this is done, we shall continue to share the blame for the miserable state of our political life which, at the end of the nineteenth century, appeared to have made but little advance from the time when Bishop Berkeley asked ’Whether our parties are not a burlesque upon politics.’

The Irish Unionist party is supposed to unite all who, like the author, are opposed to the plunge into what is called Home Rule.  But its propagandist activities in Ireland are confined to preaching the doctrine of the status quo, and preaching it only to its own side.  From the beginning the party has been intimately connected with the landlord class; yet even upon the land question it has thrown but few gleams of the constructive thought which that question so urgently demanded, and which it might have been expected to apply to it.  Now and again an individual tries to broaden the basis of Irish Unionism and to bring himself into touch with the life of the people.  But the nearer he gets to the people the farther he gets from the Irish Unionist leaders.  The lot of such an individual is not a happy one:  he is regarded as a mere intruder who does not know the rules of the game, and he is treated by the leading players on both sides like a dog in a tennis court.

Two main causes appear to me to account for the failure of the Irish Unionist party to make itself an effective force in Irish national life.  The great misunderstanding to which I have attributed the unhappy state of Anglo-Irish relations kept the country in a condition of turmoil which enabled the Unionist party to declare itself the party of law and order.  Adopting Lord Salisbury’s famous prescription, ’twenty years of resolute government,’ they made it what its author would have been the last man to consider it, a sufficient justification for a purely negative and repressive policy.  Such an attitude was open to somewhat obvious objections.  No one will dispute the proposition that the government of Ireland, or of any other country, should be resolute, but twenty years of resolute government, in the narrow sense in which it came to be interpreted, needed for its success, what cannot be had under party government, twenty years of consistency.  It may be better to be feared than to be loved, but Machiavelli would have been the first to admit that his principle