I feel some hesitation in asking the reader to believe that a great and lasting revolution in Irish thought has been brought about in such a moment in the life of a people as twelve short years.  But a lesser number of months seemed to the English mind adequate for the accomplishment of the change.  And what a change it was that they conceived!  To them, less than a year ago, the Irish Question was not merely unsolved, but in its essential features appeared unaltered.  After seven centuries of experimental statecraft—­so varied that the English could not believe any expedient had yet to be tried—­the vast majority of the Irish people regarded the Government as alien, disputed the validity of its laws, and felt no responsibility for administration, no respect for the legislature, or for those who executed its decrees.  And this in a country forming an integral part of the United Kingdom, where the fundamental basis of government is assumed to be the consent of the governed!  Nor were any hopes entertained that the cloud would quickly pass.  During the Boer war the prophets of evil, in predicting the calamity which was to fall upon the British Empire, took as their text the failure of English government in Ireland.  When they wanted to paint in the darkest colours the coming heritage of woe, they wrote upon the wall, ‘Another Ireland in South Africa’; and if any exception was taken to the appropriateness of the phrase, it was certainly not on the ground that Ireland had ceased to be a warning to British statesmen.

I believe, quite as strongly as the most optimistic Englishman, that there has been a great change from this state of things in Irish sentiment, and my explanation of that change, if less dramatic than the transformation theory, affords more solid ground for optimism.  This change in the sentiment of Irishmen towards England is due, not to a sudden emotion of the incomprehensible Celt, but really to the opinion—­rapidly growing for the last dozen years—­that great as is the responsibility of England for the state of Ireland, still greater is the responsibility of Irishmen.  The conviction has been more and more borne in upon the Irish mind that the most important part of the work of regenerating Ireland must necessarily be done by Irishmen in Ireland.  The result has been that many Irishmen, both Unionists and Nationalists, without in any way abandoning their opposition to, or support of, the attempt to solve the political problem from without, have been trying—­not without success—­to solve some part of the Irish Question from within.  The Report of the Recess Committee, on which I shall dwell later, was the first great fruit of this movement, and the Dunraven Treaty, which paved the way for Mr. Wyndham’s Land Act, was a further fruit, and not the result of an inexplicable transformation scene.