What is the ultimate remedy for the congestion of business in the House of Commons? Who can doubt that it is the delegation of provincial business to provincial assemblies? There has been, I say, no lack of expedients. The setting up of four Grand Committees, the institution of the guillotine as a regular feature of House of Commons procedure in regard to every first-class measure, the frequent resort to autumn sittings—these methods have been tried and found wanting. Little prospect of relief is afforded by any projected limitation of speeches or by the carrying over of Bills. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the legitimate claims on the attention of Parliament grow with the needs of a growing population and of an expanding empire. In part it is the problem of new wine in old bottles. Our Parliament was not constructed for its present purposes. Originally it was the legislature for England alone. The provincial affairs of Scotland were first imposed on it, and then those of Ireland. Concurrently, the management of an empire, as varied in its legislative and administrative requirements as the various climates it enjoys, has been added to our responsibilities. You may if you like regard our present House of Commons as an Imperial Legislature stooping from time to time to the consideration of provincial business, or as a provincial Parliament rising in its moments of inspiration to the discharge of high Imperial duties. The same Parliament that has to decide to-day some small matter of purely local Irish or Scottish concern must settle a national strike to-morrow, approve the naval strategy of the Empire, or frame the constitution for a people. To the executive that is responsible to the same Parliament are entrusted all the tremendous issues of peace and war. It is a supreme testimony to the genius of the British peoples for government that we have voyaged so far without shipwreck everywhere except in the region of Irish affairs. By all admissions we have made a mess of Ireland. With singular and unwonted perverseness we have refused for more than a hundred years to apply to Ireland the principles of self-government that have justified their application in every province of the Empire that is mainly inhabited by people of our own race. We have risked and we have incurred the disaffection of the Irish themselves; we have imposed on them and on ourselves untold suffering and expense; we have imperilled the whole fabric of our Parliamentary institutions.