have produced an effect on Great Britain too.  All over our country people have seen Bills which they were told beforehand would be ruinous to the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom—­Land Bills and Local Government Bills—­passed into law; and so far from the dire consequences which were apprehended from these measures, they have found—­you here have found—­that great good has resulted from that legislation.  Many people are encouraged by what has taken place to make a step forward in the future; and I think if we need to look for any further encouragement, we should find it in the great and undisputed triumph which, under the mercy of Heaven, has attended our policy in South Africa, and has resulted in bringing into the circle of the British Empire a strong and martial race, which might easily have been estranged for ever.

The Irish polity finds its fellow nowhere in the world.  It is a Government responsible neither to King nor people.  It is not a democratic Government, nor an autocratic Government, nor even an oligarchical Government.  It is a Government hag-ridden by forty-one administrative Boards, whose functions overlap one another and sometimes conflict with one another.  Some are fed with money from the Consolidated Fund, some are supplied by vote of the House of Commons, some are supplied from savings from the Irish Development grant.  Some of these Boards are under the Viceroy, some under the Chief Secretary, some under Treasury control, and some are under no control at all.  The administration resulting from that system is costly, inefficient, unhandy beyond all description:  a mighty staff of officials and police; a people desperately poor; taxation which rises automatically with every increase in the expenditure of this vast and wealthy island; and a population which dwindles tragically year by year.  Add to all this a loyalist caste, capable and well-organised, who are taught generation after generation to look for support not to their own countrymen, but to external force derived from across the sea.  There exists in effect in Ireland at the present time almost exactly the same situation which would have grown up in South Africa, if we had not had the wit and the nerve to prevent it.  Take the whole of this situation as I have described it, thrust it into the arena of British politics to be the centre of contending factions, and the panorama of Irish government is complete.

With these facts before us, upon the authority of men like Lord Dunraven, Sir Joseph West-Ridgeway, Sir Antony MacDonnell, Lord Dudley, and others who have served the Crown in Ireland—­is it wonderful that we should refuse to turn our eyes away from the vision of that other Ireland, free to control her own destiny in all that properly concerns herself, free to devote the native genius of her people to the purposes of her own self-culture—­the vision of that other Ireland which Mr. Gladstone had reserved as the culminating achievement of his long