I need hardly say that I do not admit the fairness of this statement of the case, because some of the premises are untrue, and because it misrepresents the nature of the Irish Government which Mr. Gladstone’s Bill would have created.  But I am trying to state the case as it was sedulously and skilfully presented to Englishmen.  And it told all the more upon English waverers, because the considerations above mentioned seemed, if well founded, to destroy and cut away the chief ground on which Home Rule had been advocated, viz. that it would relieve England from the constant pressure of Irish discontent and agitation, and bring about a time of tranquillity, permitting good feeling to grow up between the peoples.  If Home Rule was, after all, to be nothing more than a half-way house to independence, an Irish Parliament only a means of extorting a more complete emancipation from imperial control, was it not much better to keep things as they were, and go on enduring evils, the worst of which were known already?  Hence the advocates of the Bill denied not the weight of the argument, but its applicability.  Separation, they urged, is impossible, for it is contrary to the nature of things, which indicates that the two islands must go together.  It is not desired by the Irish people, for it would injure them far more than it could possibly injure England, since Ireland finds in England the only market for her produce, the only source whence capital flows to her.  A small revolutionary party has, no doubt, conspired to obtain it.  But the only sympathy they received was due to the fact that the legitimate demand of Ireland for a recognition of her national feeling and for the management of her own local affairs was contemptuously ignored by England.  The concession of that demand will banish the notion even from those minds which now entertain it, whereas its continued refusal may perpetuate that alienation of feeling which is at the bottom of all the mischief, the one force that makes for separation.

It is no part of my present purpose to examine these arguments and counter arguments, but only to show what were the grounds on which a majority of the English voters refused to pronounce in favour of the Home Rule Bill.  The reader will have observed that the issues raised were not only numerous, but full of difficulty.  They were issues of fact, involving a knowledge both of the past history of Ireland and of her present state.  They were also issues of inference, for even supposing the broad facts to be ascertained, these facts were susceptible of different interpretations, and men might, and did, honestly draw opposite conclusions from them.  A more obscure and complicated problem, or rather group of problems, has seldom been presented to a nation for its decision.  But the nation did not possess the requisite knowledge.  Closely connected as Ireland seems to be with England, long as the Irish question has been a main trouble in English politics, the English and Scottish people