Chamberlain said in memorable language: “I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts to rule the sister country. It is a system which is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country. It is a system as completely centralised and bureaucratic as that with which Russia governs Poland, or as that which prevailed in Venice under the Austrian rule. An Irishman at the moment cannot move a step—he cannot lift a finger in any parochial, municipal, or educational work, without being confronted with, interfered with, controlled by an English official, appointed by a foreign Government, and without a shade or shadow of representative authority.” It was not until 1898 that popular control in local affairs was established by the County Councils’ Act. Englishmen often say to me: “What an illogical and unreasonable people you Irish are. At the very time when we were showing our determination to do justice to Ireland, when we had disestablished the State Church in 1869, and passed the Land Act of 1870 at that very time, in the very year 1870, you started the Home Rule movement.” Englishmen say many foolish things about Ireland, because they know nothing about Irish history, and indeed give very little serious thought to Irish affairs. The fact that the English State Church was not disestablished for sixty-nine years after the Union, and that an Act for the protection of the tenants and for securing the proper cultivation of the soil was not passed until seventy years after the Union; and that it took constant agitation and incessant outbursts of lawlessness and crime and finally a revolutionary convulsion to accomplish these things, was a sufficient justification for the establishment of the Home Rule movement in 1870. Had the government of Ireland in the nineteenth century been as good as it was bad, still I hope that the Irish people would not have relinquished their national claims—would not have sold their birthright for any mess of porridge; but they did not get the porridge; rather vinegar and gall had been the offering of England to the “sister” isle during sixty-nine years of “Union.” I have said that the seed sown by O’Connell and Young Ireland took root, so did the seed sown by England. Extremes meet. The agitator—the rebel—and the English Government combined to keep the spirit of nationality alive, and to make the demand for Home Rule inevitable and irresistible. It was on May 19th, 1870, that the Home Rule Association was founded. It was no wonder after seventy years of the Union that failed that the following resolution should have been passed: “That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs.”