and 1893 with the speeches on South Africa in 1905-06. With the alteration of a name or two, with the substitution, for example, of Johannesburg for Ulster, the speeches against South African and Irish Home Rule might be almost interchangeable. For electioneering purposes, evidences, in word and act, of Boer treason, rapacity, and vindictiveness, could have been made by skilful orators to seem damning and unanswerable. All the arts for inflaming popular passion under the pretext of "patriotism" would have been used, and we know that patriotism sometimes assumes strange disguises. The material would have been rich and easily accessible. Instead of having to ransack ancient numbers of Irish or American newspapers for incautious phrases dropped by Mr. Redmond or Mr. O'Brien in moments of unusual provocation, the speeches of Botha, Steyn, and De Wet, during the war, and even at the Peace Conference, would have been ready for the hoardings and the fly-sheets, and they would have had an appreciable effect. Am I weakening the case for democracy itself in pressing this view? Surely not. One democracy is incapable of understanding the domestic needs and problems of another. Whenever, therefore, a democracy finds itself responsible for the adjudication of a claim for Home Rule from white men, it should limit itself to ascertaining whether the claim is genuine and sincere. If it is, the claim should be granted, and a Constitution constructed in friendly concert with the men who are to live under it. That way lies safety and honour, and, happily, the democracy is being educated to that truth. If this be a counsel of perfection; if the difficult and delicate task of settling the details of Irish Home Rule is to be hampered and complicated by the resuscitation of those time-honoured discussions over abstract principles which ought long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let every patriotic and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten and mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations, and to substitute reason for passion.