[Footnote 3: I may mention here another fact whose significance
impressed some among us. Parliament, which usually sinned in not doing
for Ireland what Ireland asked, occasionally passed bills for Ireland
which were regarded as setting very bad precedents for England. By some
bargain between the Irish Office and the Nationalist members, measures
were put through which may have been right as respects Ireland, but
which embodied principles mischievous as respects Great Britain. We felt
that if it was necessary to enact such statutes, it would be better that
they should proceed from an Irish Legislature rather than from the
Imperial Parliament, which might be embarrassed by its own acts when
asked to extend the same principles to England. The Labourers' Act of
July, 1885, is the most conspicuous example.]
[Footnote 4: At Easter, 1885, I met a number of leading Ulster Liberals
in Belfast, told them that Home Rule was certainly coming, and urged
them to prepare some plan under which any special interests they
conceived the Protestant part of Ulster to have, would be effectually
safe-guarded. They were startled, and at first discomposed, but
presently told me I was mistaken; to which I could only reply that time
would show, and perhaps sooner then even English Liberals expected.]
[Footnote 5: My recollection of a conversation with a distinguished
public man in July, 1882, enables me to say that this fact had impressed
itself upon us as early as that year. He doubted the fact, but admitted
that, if true, it was momentous. The passing of the Franchise Bill made
it, in our view, more momentous than ever.]
[Footnote 6: Some thought that its functions should be very limited,
while large powers were granted to county boards or provincial councils.
But most had, I think, already perceived that the grant of a merely
local self-government, while retaining an irresponsible central
bureaucracy, would do more harm than good. It seemed at first sight a
safer experiment than the creation of a central legislative body. But,
like many middle courses, it combined the demerits and wanted the merits
of each of the extreme courses. It would not make the country tranquil,
as firm and long-continued repression might possibly do. Neither would
it satisfy the people's demands, and divert them from struggles against
England to disputes and discussions among themselves, as the gift of
genuine self-government might do.]
[Footnote 7: Some of us had tried to do so. I prepared such a scheme in
the autumn of 1885, and submitted it to some specially competent
friends. Their objections, made from what would now be called the
Unionist point of view, were weighty. But their effect was to convince
me that the scheme erred on the side of caution; and I believe the
experience of other Liberals who worked at the problem to have been the
same as my own--viz. that a small and timid scheme is more dangerous
than a large and bold one. Thus the result of our thinking from July,
1885, till April, 1886, was to make us more and more disposed to reject
half-and-half solutions. Some of us (of whom I was one) expressed this
feeling by saying in our election addresses in 1885, "the further we go
in giving the Irish people the management of their own affairs (subject
to the maintenance of the unity of the empire) the better."]
[Footnote 8: Quoted from an article contributed by myself to the
American _Century Magazine_, which I refer to because, written in the
spring of 1883, it expresses the ideas here stated.]