fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy.  In the development of English ceremonial, “God Save the King!” gets to the head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power.  So long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty knows no bounds.

The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got it.  There could not be a better statement of the methods which she employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling’s: 

    “Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing,
    Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King.”

It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus established was better fitted for the home market than for export.  But this does not affect the fact that, at the end of the process, the English people were in the saddle.  But the Irish people are not in the saddle, they are under it.  Indeed, the capital sin of Dublin Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which has seized upon the estate of the people.  In Ireland, under its regime, the nation has had as much to say to its own public policy as a Durbar-elephant has to say to the future of India.  There is just this difference in favour of the elephant:  at least he has riot to pay for the embroidered palanquins, and the prodding-poles, of his riders.  We are all agreed that loyalty is a duty.  It is the duty of every government to be loyal to the welfare, the nobler traditions, the deep-rooted ideals, the habit of thought of its people.  It is the duty of every government to be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere justice through which the most ancient heavens abide fresh and strong.  And until these prime duties have been faithfully performed, no government need expect and none can exact “loyalty” from its subjects.

But it seems that we are compromised on other grounds.  The inscription on the Parnell Memorial is trumpeted about the constituencies with equal energy by opponents wise and otherwise: 

“No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.  No man has a right to say to his country, ’Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.’  We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall.”

What the precise matter of offence may be one finds it difficult to discover.  Mr Balfour very properly characterises as the utterance of a statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines to usurp the throne and sceptre of Providence.  But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home Rule of the note of “finality.”  With the suggestion that Home Rule is not at all events