Order, a portent if not yet a power.  So much has been done in the country.  But it is in the cities, those workshops of the society of the future, that the change is most marked.  The new movement finds an apt epitome in the political career of Mr Joseph Devlin.  The workers of Belfast had been accustomed to see labour problems treated by the old type of Unionist member of parliament either with cowardice or with contempt. Enfin Malesherbes vint.  At last a man rose up out of their own class, although a Catholic and a Nationalist.  He spoke with an awakening eloquence, and he made good his words.  In every industrial struggle in that sweated city he interposed his strong word to demand justice for the wage-earner.  This was a new sort of politics.  It bore fruit where Ulster Unionism had been but a barren fig-tree.  The democracy of Belfast accepted their leader.  They gave him a majority of 16 in West Belfast in 1906 and in four years they had multiplied it by forty.  The Boyne was bridged, and everything that has since happened has but added a new stay or girder to the strength of the bridge.  And not only labour but capital has passed across that estranging river to firm ground of patriotism and national unity.  Lord Pirrie, the head of the greatest manufacturing enterprise in Belfast, is an ardent Home Ruler.  Business men, ministers of religion, even lawyers, are thinking out things quietly beneath the surface.  The new “Ulster” is breaking its shell.  Parties are forming on the basis of economic realities, not on that of “religious” phantasms.

As for the old “Ulster,” it remains a problem not for the War Office, but for the Department of Education.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE

The inevitableness of Home Rule resides in the fact that it is, as one might say, a biped among ideas.  It marches to triumph on two feet, an Irish and an Imperial foot.  If there were in Ireland no demand whatever for self-government it would, nevertheless, be necessary in the interests of the Empire to force it on her.  The human, or as some people may prefer to call it, the sociological case for Home Rule, and the historical case for it have already been outlined.  We now turn to consideration, of another order, derived from Political Mechanics, or rather bearing on the mere mechanism of politics.  Let us approach the problem first from the Imperial side.

On the whole, the most remarkable thing about the British Empire is that there is no British Empire.  We are in presence of the familiar distinction between the raw material and the finished article.  There are, indeed, on the surface of the globe a number of self-governing colonies, founded and peopled by men of Irish and English blood.  In each of these the United Kingdom is represented by a Governor whose whole duty consists in being seen on formal occasions, but never heard in counsel or rebuke.  The only