leave their every-day work; were they willing to forsake their own business, they are not the men to conduct with success the parliamentary game of brag, obstruction, and finesse.  Keep, in short, the Irish members at Westminster, and you ensure the supremacy in Ireland of professional politicians.  By a curious fatality the Gladstonian policy which weakens England ruins Ireland.  Let no one fancy that this is the delusion of an English Unionist.  Sir Gavan Duffy is an Irish Nationalist of a far higher type than the men who have drawn money from the Clan-na-Gael.  In ’48 he was a rebel, but if he was disloyal to England, he was always careful of the honour and character of Ireland.  He, at least, perceives the danger to his country of retaining Irish members in a Parliament where they had ceased to have any proper place.  ‘For my own part,’ he says, ’I should not care if they did not attend [the Imperial Parliament] for a generation, which will be needed for the manipulation of their own affairs.’

All this, I shall be told, is prophecy; Gladstonian hopes are as reasonable as Unionist fears.  So be it.  But in this matter my predictions have a special claim on the attention of the Ministry, they coincide with the forecast, or the foresight, of the present[40] Chief Secretary for Ireland.

’Let us suppose that these Irish representatives for Imperial purposes are not chosen by the legislative body, but are chosen directly by Irish constituencies.  You have already, according to our plan, two sets of constituencies.  You have the 103 constituencies that return the popular branch of the legislative body, and you have those other constituencies up to seventy-five which return the elective members of the other branch of the legislative body.  You have, therefore, got already on our plan two sets of constituencies.  Now, if you are going to send members to Westminster for Imperial purposes to the number of forty-five or to the number of ninety-five, you must mark out a third set of constituencies—­you must have a third set of elections.  A system of that kind does not strike me at least as being exactly the thing for a country of which we are assured that before everything else its prime want is a profound respite from political turmoil.  There are plenty of other objections from the Irish point of view, which I am not now going to dwell upon.  Depend upon it that an Irish Legislature will not be up to the magnitude of the enormous business that is going to be cast upon it unless you leave all the brains that Irish public men have got to do Irish work in Ireland.  Depend upon this, too, that if you have one set of Irish members in London it is a moral certainty that disturbing rivalries, disturbing intrigues would spring up, and that the natural and wholesome play of forces and parties and leaders in the Irish Assembly would be complicated and confused and thrown out of gear by the separate representatives of the country.  All this is bad enough.’[41]