but by Congress, the judicial being the final authority and not the political, Britain should have Parliament as the one national final authority over Irish measures.  Therefore, the acts of the local legislature of Ireland should lie for three months’ continuous session upon the table of the House of Commons, subject to adverse action of the House, but becoming operative unless disapproved.  The provision would be a dead letter unless improper legislation were enacted, but if there were improper legislation, then it would be salutary.  The clause, I said, was needed to assure timid people that no secession could arise.

Urging this view upon Mr. Morley afterwards, he told me this had been proposed to Parnell, but rejected.  Mr. Gladstone might then have said:  “Very well, this provision is not needed for myself and others who think with me, but it is needed to enable us to carry Britain with us.  I am now unable to take up the question.  The responsibility is yours.”

One morning at Hawarden Mrs. Gladstone said: 

“William tells me he has such extraordinary conversations with you.”

These he had, no doubt.  He had not often, if ever, heard the breezy talk of a genuine republican and did not understand my inability to conceive of different hereditary ranks.  It seemed strange to me that men should deliberately abandon the name given them by their parents, and that name the parents’ name.  Especially amusing were the new titles which required the old hereditary nobles much effort to refrain from smiling at as they greeted the newly made peer who had perhaps bought his title for ten thousand pounds, more or less, given to the party fund.

Mr. Blaine was with us in London and I told Mr. Gladstone he had expressed to me his wonder and pain at seeing him in his old age hat in hand, cold day as it was, at a garden party doing homage to titled nobodies.  Union of Church and State was touched upon, and also my “Look Ahead,” which foretells the reunion of our race owing to the inability of the British Islands to expand.  I had held that the disestablishment of the English Church was inevitable, because among other reasons it was an anomaly.  No other part of the race had it.  All religions were fostered, none favored, in every other English-speaking state.  Mr. Gladstone asked: 

“How long do you give our Established Church to live?”

My reply was I could not fix a date; he had had more experience than I in disestablishing churches.  He nodded and smiled.

When I had enlarged upon a certain relative decrease of population in Britain that must come as compared with other countries of larger area, he asked: 

“What future do you forecast for her?”

I referred to Greece among ancient nations and said that it was, perhaps, not accident that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Burns, Scott, Stevenson, Bacon, Cromwell, Wallace, Bruce, Hume, Watt, Spencer, Darwin, and other celebrities had arisen here.  Genius did not depend upon material resources.  Long after Britain could not figure prominently as an industrial nation, not by her decline, but through the greater growth of others, she might in my opinion become the modern Greece and achieve among nations moral ascendancy.