3.  Inclusion in reduced numbers for all purposes.  By “reduced numbers” is meant numbers less than the population of Ireland warrants.  For the sake of argument we may assume the number to be 35, that is, approximately half the proper proportion; but directly we desert a scientific principle of allocation, the exact figure we adopt is a matter of arbitrary choice.

Mr. Gladstone appears to have contemplated this plan for a brief period in 1889; but he dropped it.  Clearly it cannot be defended on any logical grounds, but only as a compromise designed, as it avowedly was, to conciliate British opinion.  It would minimize but not remove the difficulties inherent in No. 1; and so far as it did lessen these difficulties, the representation given would be impotent and superfluous.  That is why I have taken it last in order of the three possible methods of inclusion.  It raises in the sharpest and clearest form the important question underlying the whole of the discussion we have just been through—­namely, what are to be the powers delegated to the Irish Parliament and Executive, and what are to be the powers reserved to the Imperial Parliament and Executive?

If the powers reserved are small, it will be possible to justify not merely a small Irish representation in the House of Commons, but even under certain conditions the total exclusion of Irish members.  Indeed, if the figure 35 corresponded to the facts of the case, one might as well abandon these painful efforts to “conciliate British opinion,” accept total exclusion, and substitute Conference for representation.  If the powers reserved are large, full representation in spite of all the crushing objections to it, will be absolutely necessary, in order to safeguard Irish interests.  Here is the grand dilemma, and it says little for our common sense as a nation that we should submit to be puzzled and worried by it any longer.  Half the worry arises from the old and infinitely pernicious habit of regarding Ireland as outside the pale of political science, of ignoring in her case what Lord Morley has called the “fundamental probabilities of civil society.”  Let us break this habit once and for all and take the logical and politic course of total exclusion, with its logical and politic accompaniment, a measure of Home Rule wide enough to justify the absence of Irish representation at Westminster.  That will be found to be the path both of duty and of safety.

Let it be clearly understood that lapse of time has not diminished appreciably the power of the arguments against the inclusion of Irish Members in the House of Commons.  On their merits, these arguments are still unanswerable, and we had better recognize the fact.  Mr. Balfour said, in 1893, “Those questions” (of representation at Westminster) “are not capable of solution, and the very fact that they are incapable of solution affords, in our opinion, a conclusive argument against the whole scheme, of which one or other of the plans in question must form a part.”  Speaking as a Unionist, Mr. Balfour was right, and, as Home Rulers, we should be wise to remember it.