The policy of “Unionist” leaders is to meet the Irish desire for an uplifting pride in the life of the Irish commonwealth by a flat denial. Ireland, we are told, is not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be, a nation. A disorganized and contentious people, incapable of rightly using any polity Irish or English, we have not, it is said, even the materials of a nation. We are only “material,” to use an old Irish expression, for an Empire. The island in fact was never a kingdom till England gave it a king worthy the name; so how could it be a nation? To the gift of a king England added her invention of a Parliament, but the failure of Parliament in Ireland was open and flagrant; how then talk about a nation? “There are Englishmen and Scotchmen,” says Mr. Balfour, “who really suppose that England has deprived Ireland of its own national institutions, has absorbed Ireland, which had a polity and a civilization of its own—has absorbed it in the wider sphere of British politics; and who think that a great wrong has thereby been done to a separate nationality.... It is a profound illusion. It has no basis in historical fact at all.” He gives a history of his own. “Those whom the Nationalists choose more particularly and especially to call Irishmen, namely, the original inhabitants of Ireland—those who were there before the Celt and before the Saxon and before the Norman—never had the chance of developing, they never could have developed, a polity of their own, any more than the Highlanders. That does not mean that they are in any sense inferior, but it does mean that all this talk of restoring to Ireland Irish institutions, and of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, has no historic basis whatever.” It is for such wayward imaginings that the historic claim of Ireland is denied. What meaning shall we give to this new dogma of the partiality of Nationalists for some pre-Celtic race—whether Iberian, or whether (as some explain the phrase) Finn MacCumhaill and his followers, ingeniously regarded by Mr. Balfour as having adorned Ireland before the Celtic age? Where was the “Saxon” settlement in Ireland between the Celts and the Normans? What is the comparison of the Highlanders with the original inhabitants of Ireland? Why should Mr. Balfour’s doubts of a pre-Celtic polity put an end to all talk of Irish institutions and Irish ideas?