direct railway communication with all England and Scotland would be immense. From the tourist and sporting point of view Ireland would reap a doubled and trebled harvest. More than that, the bridging of St. George's Channel will for the first time enable the west coast of Ireland to become what it ought to be, the true west coast of the United Kingdom, the starting point of all our fast mail and passenger services across the Atlantic. But all this implies the Union, the existence of a single Government interested in the development of the United Kingdom as a whole. Separate governments in Great Britain and Ireland would not have the same inducement to give financial encouragement to such schemes. Irish manufacturers and British farmers alike might protest against being taxed to facilitate the competition of rivals in their own markets. An Irish Government would have neither sufficient money nor sufficient interest to give the subsidies necessary to secure a three days' service across the Atlantic. A British Government would naturally develop one of its existing ports, or some new port on the west coast of Scotland, rather than build up a new source of revenue and national strength in a separate State. No one could blame it, any more than we could blame the Canadian Government for wishing to subsidise a fast service from Halifax or some other port in the Dominion rather than one from St. John's, Newfoundland. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Navigation Acts deliberately destroyed Irish shipping. A policy of _laisser faire_ in matters of national communication has hitherto prevented its revival. To-day new ideas are in the air. Those ideas can be applied, either from the standpoint of the Union or from that of separatism. In the one case Ireland has the prospect of becoming, what her geographical position entitles her to be, the eastern bridge-head of the North Atlantic. In the other the immense power of the larger capital and larger subsidies of Great Britain will be as effective as any navigation laws of the past in leaving her a derelict by the wayside, continuing to wait idle and hungry, with empty harbours, while the great streams of commerce flow past her to north and south.