was that in practical England the Irish Question became the great political issue, while in sentimental Ireland there set in a reaction from politics and an inclination to the practical.  The twentieth century has already brought to birth the new Ireland upon whose problems I shall write.  If the human interest of these problems is to be realized, if their significance is not to be as wholly misunderstood as that of every other Irish movement which has perplexed the statesmen who have managed our affairs, they must be studied in their relation to the English and Irish events of the period in which the new Ireland was conceived.

In 1885 Gladstone, appealing to an electorate with a large accession of newly enfranchised voters, transferred the struggle over the Irish Question from Ireland to Great Britain.  The position taken up by the average English Home Ruler was, it will be remembered, simple and intelligible.  The Irish had stated in the proper constitutional way what they wanted, and that, in the first flush of a victorious democracy, when counting heads irrespective of contents was the popular method of arriving at political truth, was assumed to be precisely what they ought to have.  A long but inconclusive contest ensued.  At times it looked as if the Liberal-Irish alliance might snatch a victory for their policy.  But when Gladstone was forced to break with the Irish Leader, and Parnellism without Parnell became obviously impossible, the English realised that the working of representative institutions in Ireland had produced not a democracy but a dictatorship, and they began to attach a lesser significance to the verdict of the Irish polls.  Their faith in democracy was unimpaired, but, in their opinion, the Irish had not yet risen to its dignity.  So most English Radicals came round to a view which they had always reprobated when advanced by the English Conservatives, and political inferiority was added to the other moral and intellectual defects which made the Irish an inferior race!

The anti-climax to the Gladstone crusade was reached when Lord Rosebery in 1894 took over the premiership from the greatest English advocate of the Irish cause.  The position of the new leader was very simple.  In effect, he told the Irish Nationalists that the English party he was about to lead had done its best for them.  They must now regard themselves as partners in the United Kingdom, with the British as the predominant partner.  Until the predominant partner could be brought to take the Irish view of the partnership, the relations between them must remain substantially as they were.  And not only must the concession of Home Rule await the conversion of the British electorate, but before the demand could be effectively preferred, another leader must rise up among the Irish; and he, for all Lord Rosebery knew, was at the moment being wheeled in a perambulator.  This apparently cynical avowal of the new premier’s own attitude towards Home Rule accurately stated the facts of the situation, and fairly reflected the mind of the British electorate, after Irish obstruction had given them an opportunity of studying the bearing of the Irish Question on English politics.