Home Rule | Page 6

not merely a king and parliament, but also an army subject to purely Bavarian control in time of peace, and a separate system of posts, telegraphs, and state railways.[11] Are we to say that trust and tolerance are German virtues, unknown to the British people?
But they are not unknown to the British people. Our own colonists have set us a better example. Canada has a far more difficult religious problem than Great Britain. She has two provinces side by side--Quebec and Ontario--both with the same religious problem as Ireland. In both there are strong religious minorities. Quebec is predominantly Catholic, and Ontario is predominantly Protestant. Thus:--
Quebec-- Catholics 1,429,000 Protestants 189,000
Ontario-- Protestants 1,626,000 Catholics 390,000
How is this problem solved? Why, by Home Rule. For a long time--from 1840 to 1887--Canada made the experiment of governing these two provinces under one Parliament and from one centre. That experiment never succeeded. As long as they were under one government, the minority in each of these provinces insisted on appealing for help to the majority in the other. There arose the evil of "Ascendancy "--the government of a majority by a minority. At last the Canadians faced the problem. In 1867 they divided the provinces, and gave them each a Home Rule government of their own, subject to the Dominion Parliament. Since then there has been no more trouble about Ascendancy. Quebec and Ontario now settle their own affairs, including Education and all other local matters, and no one ever hears anything about the ill-treatment of minorities.
So much, then, for the permanent factors--Sea, Race, and Religion. There is no insuperable obstacle there. Rather it is here--in these great dominating facts--that the strongest argument for Home Rule must ever be found. For it is those things that constitute nationality.
The real difficulties in the way of Home Rule were found, both in 1886 and 1893, not in these permanent things, but in the changing facets of human laws. It was the Land Question that in all the speeches of 1886 provided the strongest argument. It was the absence of local government, and the presumed incapacity for local government, that filled so many Unionist speeches. It was the quarrel over University Education that provided the best evidence of incompatibility of temper between Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant.
I shall show that in all these respects the problem has completely and radically changed since 1893.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] By a majority of 34 on the third reading--301 to 267--September 1st, 1893.
[2] Friday, September 8th, 1893. 419 to 41; majority against the Bill of 378.
[3] See Appendix A for this Bill.
[4] "The Story of the Home Rule Session." (1893.) Written by Harold Spender, sketched by F. Carruthers Gould (now Sir Francis C. Gould). London: The Westminster Gazette and Fisher Unwin.
[5] This famous phrase was first coined by Grattan, but was so often said by Gladstone that it was, in 1886, regarded as his.
[6] See a very interesting account of the present Irish Executive in "Home Rule Problems" (P.S. King and Son. London. 1s.) in a chapter (iv.) entitled "The Present System of Government, in Ireland," by G.F.H. Berkeley. There are 67 Boards, of which only 26 are under direct control of the Irish Secretary. No Parliamentary statute applies to Ireland, of course, unless that country is expressly included by name.
[7] See, for a popular account of this Synod, Green's "History of the English People," Vol. I., p. 55.
[8] The central Civil Service is predominantly Protestant, and in municipalities like Belfast the Catholics hold a very small proportion of the salaried posts.
[9] Census for 1911. Preliminary Report. Page 6.
[10] Census Summary. Preliminary Report. Page 6.
[11] See "The Statesman's Year Book," 1911, pp. 877-8.

THE HOME RULE CASE
THE CASE THAT HAS CHANGED--AND IS NOW STRONGER
i.--THE COUNCILS AND ii.--THE LAND.
"They saved the country because they lived in it, as the others abandoned it because they lived out of it."
GRATTAN.
CHAPTER II.
THE HOME RULE CASE
Those who, like myself, visited Ireland last summer as delegates of the Eighty Club included some who had not thoroughly explored that country since the early nineties. They were all agreed that a great change had taken place in the internal condition of Ireland. They noticed a great increase of self-confidence, of prosperity, of hope. Many who entered upon that tour with doubts as to the power of the Irish people to take up the burden of self-government came back convinced that her increase in material prosperity would form a firm and secure basis on which to build the new fabric.
What does this new prosperity amount to? The new Census figures leave us in no doubt as to its existence. For the first time there is a real check in that deplorable wastage of population that has been going on for more than half a century. The diminution of population in