There are many who regard the recognition of nationality as at best a regrettable necessity. They lay stress on those centrifugal tendencies that we have admitted and they feel that the greater need of mankind is for unity. But the unity which they desire can only come through the development of life in many different centres and with luxuriant divergencies of character. The doctrine of Mazzini that every nation had its own peculiar function to fulfil in the life of humanity was not pure fancy. It is easy to recognise that the leading modern nations have each, in fact, contributed something distinctive, something that would have been blurred and dulled if all had been of one speech and under one rule. Division has meant unrest, friction, war, and suffering. But it has been a necessary condition of collective vitality. Self-respect and self-confidence are necessary to a people that are to do great things, and these they cannot enjoy to the full so long as they are conscious of a mastery that galls their pride. Ireland has contributed to our literature her peculiar strain of humour and of romance, tinged with the melancholy of her historic ill-fortune. The graver tone and gentler view she will never lose, for they belong to a people who will always have behind them the memory of the centuries of that undeserved suffering which opens the eyes of men to the nature of the human tragedy. But the distinctive Irish quality may henceforward be shot with a brighter thread catching the light from her assured future as a nation. As a nation she has her part to play in the English-speaking Commonwealth, questioning the successful practicality of a dominant people with the irony, and tempering its prose with the romance born in the centuries of her probation in the valley of the shadow. XV.—The Imperial Parliament (I) The State Of Parliamentary Business. BY CECIL HARMSWORTH, M.P. There is one argument for conferring self-government on the people of Ireland that appeals with irresistible force to many ordinary members of Imperial Parliament. This is the urgent necessity for relieving Imperial Parliament of “provincial” business and setting it free to devote its best energies to the ever-increasing legislative and administrative needs of the empire.