are the English going to do with Home Rule when they get it?  What will German or Japanese or American politics be like in 1920?  These are all what Matthew Arnold calls “undiscovered things.”  The future resolutely declines to speak out of her turn.  She has a trick of keeping her secrets well, better than she keeps her promises.  Professor Dicey wrote a Unionist tract, very vehement and thunderous, in which he sought to injure Home Rule by styling it a leap in the dark.  But the whole conduct of life, in its gravest and its lightest issues alike, is a perpetual leap in the dark.  Every change of public policy is a raid across the frontiers of the unknown; or rather, as I prefer to put it, every fundamental reform is essentially an Act of Faith in to-morrow, and so it is with Home Rule.

But while none of us can prophesy all of us can conjecture, and in this case with a great deal of confidence.  On the one hand, Ireland is a country of very definite habits of thought; on the other, her immediate problems are obvious.  These two circumstances facilitate the process which the learned describe as an attempt to produce the present curve of evolution into the future.  First, then, as to the temper of mind in which an autonomous Ireland will face the world.  The one clear certainty is that it will not be rhetorical or Utopian.  Of all the libels with which we are pelted the most injurious to our repute is a kindly libel, that which represents us as a nation of orators.  To the primitive Tory the Nationalist “agitator” appears in the guise of a stormy and intractable fiend, with futility in his soul, and a College Green peroration on his lips.  The sources of this superstition are easily traced.  The English have created the noblest literature in the world, and are candidly ashamed of the fact.  In their view anybody who succeeds in words must necessarily fail in business.  The Irishman on the contrary luxuriates, like the artist that he is, in that splendor verborum celebrated by Dante.  If a speech has to be made he thinks that it should be well made, and refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as a token of genius.  He expects an orator not merely to expound facts, but to stimulate the vital forces of his audience.  These contrary conceptions of the relation of art to life have, throughout the Home Rule campaign, clashed in the English mind much to our disadvantage.  And there has been another agent of confusion, more widely human in character.  Every idea strongly held and, on the other side, strongly challenged, kindles spontaneously into passion, and every great cause has its poetry as well as its dialetics.  Men, forced to concentrate all their thought on one reform, come to see it edged with strange, mystical colours.  Let justice only triumph in this one regard, and our keel will grate on the shore of the Fortunate Islands, the Earthly Paradise.  All the harshness of life will be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden