The truth is that the federal element in this Home Rule Bill, as in that of 1893, will be merely a pretence, designed to keep timid and hesitating Home Rulers in line—­a tactical manoeuvre of much the same character as the talk about a reformed Second Chamber which preceded the Parliament Act, and found due burial in the preamble to that Act.  In essence the Bill will set up Ireland as an entirely separate state subject to certain restrictions which the Government have no serious intention of enforcing, and the Irish every intention of disregarding, or abolishing as the outcome of further agitation.  For this policy of pretence there is one admirable parallel in our Colonial history—­the policy by which “Home Rule” was “given” to the Transvaal after Majuba.  It was the same policy of avoiding expense and trouble, political or military—­the policy, in fact, of “cutting the loss”—­tricked out with the same humbug about “magnanimity” and “conciliation,” about trust in Boer (or Nationalist) moderation when in power, the same contemptuous passing over of the loyalists as persons of “too pronounced” views, or as “interested contractors and stock-jobbers."[59] It was embodied in a Convention by which the “inhabitants of the Transvaal territory” were “accorded complete self-government, subject to the suzerainty of Her Majesty” under a series of limitations which, if enforced, would have implied a measure of British control in many respects greater than that exercised over a self-governing Colony, and with a number of guarantees to protect the loyalists.  The Government was able to “save its face,” while its hesitating followers were able to quiet their consciences, by the reassuring phrases of the Convention.  The Boer Volksraad frankly declared itself still dissatisfied, but ratified the Convention, “maintaining all objections to the Convention ... and for the purpose of showing to everybody that the love of peace and unity inspires it, for the time being, and provisionally submitting the articles of the Convention to a practical test.”  If any Nationalist Convention in Dublin should accept the new Home Rule Bill, we can take it for granted that it will be in exactly the same spirit, and possibly in almost the same phraseology.[60]

From the first the limitations of the Convention were disregarded.  Short of armed intervention there was no machinery for enforcing them, and the Boers knew perfectly well that there was no real desire on the part of an embarrassed Government to raise a hornet’s nest by making the attempt.  The British resident, with his nominally autocratic powers, was a mere impotent laughing stock.  The ruined loyalists left the country, or remained to become the most embittered enemies of the British Government.  In three years a new Convention was drafted—­an even greater masterpiece of make-believe than the first—­which could be expounded to Parliament as a mere modification of certain unworkable provisions, but which the Boers