and in the House of Lords by an overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous.  But within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords, which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent.  The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly, and through the final abolition of tithes, its baneful and irritating interference with economic life.  The successive measures of land legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of 1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political privileges of the landlord class.

Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past.  What has taken its place?  What is the ruling power within Ireland?  Is it a public opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties?  Is thought free?  Has merit its reward?  Is there any unity of national purpose, transcending party divisions?  If it were necessary to give a categorical “Yes” or “No” to these questions, the answer would be “No.”  Sane energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without Home Rule.  It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvellously short space of time since the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have gone towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently thinking, united Ireland.  The whole weight of Imperial authority has been thrown into the scale against them.  Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, their constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, “Look to us.  Trust in us.  You are divided.  We are umpires,” and the reader will no doubt remember that the theory of “umpirage” was used in exactly the same way in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and classes.  Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old.  Whether or not they have consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle.  Some have, some have not; but the result of these efforts has been the same, to pull Irishmen together and to begin the creation of a genuinely national atmosphere.