eighteen years the problem remains almost exactly where it was.  There are no detailed proposals of an authoritative character in existence.  No concrete scheme was submitted to the country in the recent elections.  None is before the country now.  The reason, of course, is that the Irish question is still an acute party question, not merely in Ireland, but in Great Britain.  Party passion invariably discourages patient constructive thought, and all legislation associated with it suffers in consequence.  Tactical considerations, sometimes altogether irrelevant to the special issue, have to be considered.  In the case of Home Rule, when the balance of parties is positively determined by the Irish vote, the difficulty reaches its climax.  It is idle to blame individuals.  We should blame the Union.  So long as one island democracy claims to determine the destinies of another island democracy, of whose special needs and circumstances it is admittedly ignorant, so long will both islands suffer.

This ignorance is not disputed.  No Irish Unionist claims that Great Britain should govern Ireland on the ground that the British electorate, or even British statesmen, understand Irish questions.  On the contrary, in Ireland, at any rate, their ignorance is a matter for satirical comment with all parties.  What he complains of is, that the British electorate is beginning to carry its ignorance to the point of believing that the Irish electorate is competent to decide Irish questions, and in educating the British electorate he has hitherto devoted himself exclusively to the eradication of this error.  The financial results of the Union are such that he is now being cajoled into adding, “It is your money, not your wisdom, that we want.”  Once more, an odd state of affairs, and some day we shall all marvel in retrospect that the Union was so long sustained by a separatist argument, reinforced in latter days by such an inconsistent and unconscionable claim.

In the meantime, if only the present situation can be turned to advantage, this crowning paradox is the most hopeful element in the whole of a tangled question.  It is not only that the British elector is likely to revolt at once against the slur upon his intelligence and the drain upon his purse, but that Irish Unionism, once convinced of the tenacity and sincerity of that revolt, is likely to undergo a dramatic and beneficent transformation.  If they are to have Home Rule, Irish Unionists—­even those who now most heartily detest it—­will want the best possible scheme of Home Rule, and the best possible scheme is not likely to be the half measure which, from no fault of the statesman responsible for it, tactical difficulties may make inevitable.  If the vital energy now poured into sheer uncompromising opposition to the principles of Home Rule could be transmuted into intellectual and moral effort after the best form of Home Rule, I believe that the result would be a drastic scheme.