If the logic of events was thus making for the removal of Home Rule from the region of practical politics in England, an even more momentous change was taking place in Ireland.  Whilst the Home Rule controversy was at its height in the ’eighties and early ’nineties, some Irish grievances were incidentally dealt with—­not always under the best impulses or in the best way.  The concentration of all the available thought and energy of Irish public men upon an appeal to the passions and prejudices of English parties had led to the further postponement of all Irish endeavour to deal rationally and practically with her own problems at home.  But during the welter of contention which prevailed after the fall of Parnell, there grew up in Ireland a wholly new spirit, born of the bitter lesson which was at last being learned.  The Irish still clung undaunted to their political ideal, but its pursuit to the exclusion of all other national aims had received a wholesome check.  Thought upon the problems of national progress broadened and deepened, in a manner little understood by those who knew Ireland from without, and, indeed, by many of those accounted wise among the observers from within.  Was the realisation of a distinctive national existence, many began to ask themselves, to be for ever dependent upon the fortunes of a political campaign?  In any scheme of a reconstructed national life to which the Irish would give of their best, there must be distinctiveness—­that much every man who is in touch with Irish life is fully aware of—­but the question of existence must not be altogether ignored.  At the rate the people were leaving the sinking ship, the Irish Question would be settled in the not distant future by the disappearance of the Irish.  Had we not better look around and see how other countries with more or less analogous conditions fared?  Could we not—­Unionists and Nationalists alike—­do something towards material progress without abandoning our ideals?  Could we not learn something from a study of what our people were doing abroad?  One seemed to hear the voice of Bishop Berkeley, the biting pertinence of whose Queries is ever fresh, asking from the grave in which he had been laid to rest nearly a century and a half ago ’whether it would not be more reasonable to mend our state than complain of it; and how far this may be in our own power?’

These questionings, though not generally heard on the platform or even in the street, were none the less working in the depths of the Irish mind, and found expression not so much in words as in deeds.  Yet though the downfall of Parnell released many minds from the obsession of politics, the influence of that event was of a negative character, and it took time to produce a beneficial effect.  That fruitful last decade of the nineteenth century saw the foundation of what will some day be recognised as a new philosophy of Irish progress.  Certain new principles were then promulgated in Ireland, and gradually found acceptance; and upon those principles a new movement was built.  It is partly, indeed, to expound and justify some, at any rate, of the principles and to give an intelligible account of the practical achievement and future possibilities of this movement that I write these pages.