Many of the able men who belong to both the Irish parties will, it is to be hoped, soon be finding a far more fruitful and practical field for their abilities in a free Ireland. But the parties, as such, will disappear, on condition that the measure of Home Rule given to Ireland is adequate. On that point I shall have more to say later. If it is adequate, and Irish politicians are absorbed in vital Irish politics, the structure of the existing parties falls to pieces, to the immense advantage both of Ireland--including the Protestant sections of Ulster--and of Great Britain. At present both parties, divided normally by a gulf of sentiment, do combine for certain limited purposes of Irish legislation, but both are, in different degrees and ways, sterile. The policy of the Nationalist party has been positive in the past, because it wrung from Parliament the land legislation which saved a perishing society. It is essentially positive still in that it seeks Home Rule, which is the condition precedent to practical politics in Ireland. More, the party is independent, in a sense which can be applied to no other party in the United Kingdom. Its Members accept no offices or titles, the ordinary prizes of political life. But they themselves could not contend that they are truly representative of three-quarters of Ireland in any other sense than that they are Home Rulers. Half of the wit, brains, and eloquence of their best men runs to waste. Some of them are merely nominated by the party machine, to represent, not local needs, but a paramount principle which the electors insist rightly on setting above immediate local needs. The purpose of the Irish Unionist party in the Commons is purely negative, to defeat Home Rule. It does not represent North-East Ulster, or any other fragment of Ireland, in any sense but that. It is passionately sentimental and absolutely unrepresentative of the practical, virile genius of Ulster industry. The Irish Unionist peers, in addition to voicing the same negative, are for the most part the spokesmen of a small minority of Irishmen in whom the long habit of upholding landlord interests has begun to outlive the need.