[67] There is a very close and minute account of the growth of Irish prosperity under the Grattan Parliament in O'Connell's great Repeal speeches to the British Parliament in 1834. Between 1782 and 1797 the consumption of coffee in Ireland went up by 600 per cent., the consumption of tea by 84 per cent., of tobacco by 100 per cent., and wine by 74 per cent. All these figures ran down rapidly after 1800. [68] The Irish Parliament House, built in the eighteenth century, was, after the Act of Union, handed over to the Bank of Ireland. The House of Lords has been left intact, but special secret instructions were given that the Irish House of Commons should be divided into compartments in order that the memories of the Irish Parliament should be forgotten. Those instructions were carried out, and the Chamber of the Irish House of Commons ceased to exist. HOME RULE IN THE WORLD THE CASE FROM ANALOGY "I wish the Irish were negroes, and then we should have an advocate in the Hon. Baronet. His erratic humanity wanders beyond the ocean, and visits the hot islands of the West Indies, and thus having discharged the duties of kindness there, it returns burning and desolating, to treat with indignity and to trample upon the people of Ireland." O'CONNELL. CHAPTER IX. HOME RULE IN THE WORLD "Ah!" but I shall be told by Unionist critics who have followed me so far, "but the tendency of the world at present is all towards great empires and away from little states. You are reversing the process." This will probably be one of the most frequent arguments that we shall hear during the present discussions. We shall, perhaps, have thrown at our heads cases like the absorption of Persia by Russia, of Tripoli by Italy, of Morocco by France, and of the Congo by Germany. If we are to argue the matter on those lines it will be fair to point out, on the other side, that during the last decade Norway has separated from Sweden, new provincial and state governments have been created in Canada and the United States, new self-governing powers have been given to Cuba and the Philippines by the Americans in faithful and loyal adherence to their word at the time of the Spanish-American war, and, even more recently, new powers have been given to Alsace and Lorraine by the German Empire. So the argument might go on, to and fro, each party pelting one another with cases from other parts of the world. Perhaps at that point it might be well to remember the grave and wise warning given us by Lord Morley in his "Life of Gladstone"--that each case of political re-adjustment really stands by itself, and that often little light can be thrown, but rather darkness deepened, by studying too closely the analogies from other communities.