being invalidated by an Irish Parliament.  We may point out that an amendment to the 1893 Home Rule Bill, designed to safeguard such marriages, was rejected by the vote of the Irish Nationalist party.  But even were legislation affecting the marriage laws of the minority to be placed outside the control of a Dublin Parliament, the effect would not be to reassure the Protestant community.  Mr. James Campbell mentions a case which has profoundly stirred the Puritan feelings of Irish Protestantism.  A man charged with bigamy has been released without punishment because the first marriage, although in conformity with the law of the land, was not recognised by the Roman Catholic Church.  However justifiable that course may have been in the exceptional circumstances of that particular case, the precedent obviously prepares the way for a practical reversal of the law by executive or judicial action.  We must remember that, since the Ne Temere decree has come into force, the marriages of Protestants and Roman Catholics are held by the Roman Catholic Church to be absolutely null and void unless they are celebrated in a Roman Catholic Church.  We have also to bear in mind that these marriages will not be permitted by the priesthood except under conditions which many Irish Protestants consider humiliating and impossible.  No more deadly attack upon the faith of the Protestant minority in the three provinces in Ireland can be imagined than to make a denial of their faith the essential condition to the enjoyment of the highest happiness for which they may look upon this earth.

The second decree prohibits, under pain of excommunication, any Roman Catholic from bringing an ecclesiastical officer before a Court of Justice.  Even under the Union Government this decree is a danger to the liberty of the subject.  Under an independent Irish Government, nothing except that vast anti-clerical revolution which some people foresee could possibly reassure the people as to the attitude of the Executive Government in dealing with a large and privileged class.  These considerations make one more reason for refusing the Colonial analogy which is so ingeniously pressed by such apologists for Home Rule as Mr. Erskine Childers.  Mr. Amery analyses the confusion of thought between Home Rule as meaning responsible Government and Home Rule as meaning separate government which underlies the arguments of Liberal Home Rulers.  Ireland has Home Rule in the sense of having free representative institutions.  She is prevented by geographical and economic conditions from enjoying separate government under the same terms on which the Colonies possess it.  As Mr. Amery points out, the United Kingdom is geographically a single island group.  No part of Ireland is so inaccessible from the political centre of British power as the remoter parts of the Highlands, while racially no less than physically Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom.  Economically also the two countries are bound together in a way