For acquiescing in this and similar grants, beyond the ascertained taxable resources of the country; for the general deficiency of public spirit and matured public opinion in Ireland; for the backwardness of education, temperance legislation, and other important reforms, the Irish Parliamentary parties cannot be held responsible.  They are abnormal in their composition and aims, and, beyond a certain limited point, they are powerless, even if they had the will, to promote Irish policies.  That is the pernicious result of an unsatisfied claim for self-government.  It is the same everywhere else.  While an agitation for self-government lasts, a country is stagnant, retrograde, or, like Ireland, progressive only by dint of extraordinary native exertions.  Read the Durham report on the condition of the Canadas during the long agitation for Home Rule, and you will recognize the same state of things.  The leaders of the agitation have to concentrate on the abstract and primary claim for Home Rule, and are reluctant to dissipate their energies on minor ends.  Yet they, too, are liable to irrational and painful divisions, like that which divides Mr. O’Brien from Mr. Redmond; symptoms of irritation in the body politic, not of political sanity.  They cannot prove their powers of constructive statesmanship, because they are not given the power to construct or the responsibility which evokes statesmanship.  The anti-Home Rule partisans degenerate into violent but equally sincere upholders of a pure negation.

Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties will, it is to be hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and practical field for their abilities in a free Ireland.  But the parties, as such, will disappear, on condition that the measure of Home Rule given to Ireland is adequate.  On that point I shall have more to say later.  If it is adequate, and Irish politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics, the structure of the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense advantage both of Ireland—­including the Protestant sections of Ulster—­and of Great Britain.  At present both parties, divided normally by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain limited purposes of Irish legislation, but both are, in different degrees and ways, sterile.  The policy of the Nationalist party has been positive in the past, because it wrung from Parliament the land legislation which saved a perishing society.  It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule, which is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland.  More, the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied to no other party in the United Kingdom.  Its Members accept no offices or titles, the ordinary prizes of political life.  But they themselves could not contend that they are truly representative of three-quarters of Ireland in any other sense than that they are Home Rulers.  Half of the wit, brains, and eloquence of their best men runs to waste.  Some of them are merely nominated by the party machine, to represent, not local needs, but a paramount principle which the electors insist rightly on setting above immediate local needs.