tell me what other dish there is on the ministerial table for Ireland, except repression. Let us go to the law and the testimony. We used to be told-I see old and respected friends of mine around me who are Liberal Unionists, and their party used to say that they would not assent to Home Rule, but that they would assent to an extension of local government in Ireland. [A cheer.]

I am glad to hear that cheer, but it is a very forlorn cry. I will ask you for a single instant to listen to the history of the promise of the extension of local government in Ireland. In 1842, forty-six long years ago, a Commission reported in favor of amending the system of county government in Ireland. A bill was brought in to carry out that recommendation in 1849. It was rejected. It was brought in in 1853, and it was rejected; again in 1856 it was rejected; again another in 1857, which also was rejected.

Then there was a pause in the process of rejection until 1868, when a Parliament and the government of the day resorted to the soothing and comforting plan of appointing a Select Committee. That, just like the previous Commission, issued a copious and an admirable report, but nothing more was done. In 1875 a bill was brought in for county reform in Ireland, and in 1879 another bill was brought in which did not touch the evils that called for remedy.

In 1881, in the time of the Gladstone administration, and at a time. when Ireland, remember, was in a thousand times worse condition than the most sinister narrator can say she is now, the Queen in her Speech was made to say that a bill for the extension of local government of Ireland would be brought in; nothing was done.

In 1886 the distinguished man whom you had here last week himself said I heard him say it one afternoon-he made this promise in the name of the government of which he was a leading and an important member that it was the firm intention of the government to bring in a measure with a view of placing all control of local government in Ireland in the hands of the Irish people.

Some of you cry, "Hear, hear," but that is all gone. Listen to what Lord Hartington, the master of the government, has since said. The noble lord has said that no scheme for the extension of local government in Ireland can be entertained until there has been a definite repudiation of nationality by the Irish people. I do not want to press that too far, but at all events you will agree with me that it postpones the extension of local government in Ireland to a tolerably remote day.

Do not let Liberal Unionists deceive themselves by the belief that there is going to be a moderate extension of local government for Ireland. Do not let them retain any such illusion. Proposals for local

government will follow these Royal Commissions, Committees, Bills, Motions, into limbo, and we shall hear no more of extension of local government. This is only one illustration among many others, which, taken together, amount to a demonstration of the unfitness and incompetence of our Imperial Parliament for dealing with the political needs, the admitted and avowed political needs, of Ireland.

One speaker said something about fisheries. There was a Select Committee appointed in 1884, and there was another Royal Commission reporting a few weeks ago, but I am not sanguine enough to think that more will be done in consequence of the recommendations of that Commission than has been done in consequence of the recommendation of others.

Again, there are the Irish railways. I was wrong, by the way, that a Royal Commission was on fisheries-it was on Irish industries generally, fisheries included. On the question of railways there was a Royal Commission in 1867, and a small Committee was appointed in 1868. There were copious and admirable reports. There is another copious and admirable report laid on the table of the House of Commons this week. Nothing has been done, and I do not believe anything will be done. That is another field in which Ireland abounds in requirements and necessities, and which the British Parliament has not the power, knowledge, or inclination to deal with or to touch.

One gentleman who spoke to-night with great ability-and if people think these things I do not know why they should not be said—reproduced to my regret the old talk about the Hottentots. I confess this is the most painful part of the present controversy-that there should be men (I am sure he is one of them) of generous minds, of public spirit and patriotism, who talk, and sincerely talk, of union, and the incorporation of Ireland with Britain, and yet think that this kind of language, and what is far more, this kind of feeling, is a way likely to produce incorporation and union.

I have seen a good deal of Irishmen. I saw a great, a tremendous crowd of Irishmen the other day on their own soil. They comported themselves, many tens and scores of thousands of them, comported themselves with a good humor, a perfect order, a temper generally of which any capital in Europe-London, Paris, Berlin, or Vienna-might have been proud. I think you can do something better with such a people than alienate them by calling them and by thinking of them as Hottentots, or as in any way inferior to ourselves. That is not the way to have union and incorporation. That is not the way to make the Empire stronger.

And I apply the same to the language that is used about the Irish

members. I am not prepared to defend all that the Irish members have said and done. No, and I am not prepared to defend all that English members have done. But I ask here, as I asked in Dublin, is there to be no amnesty? Is there never to be an act of oblivion? These men, after all, have forced upon the British legislature, and have extorted from the British legislature, laws for the benefit of their own down-trodden and oppressed people. Those laws were either right or wrong. If they were wrong, the British legislature ought not to have passed them. If they were right, you ought to be very much obliged to the Irish members for awakening your sense of equity and of right.

I return again-I am going to conclude in a moment-I return again to the point. You have the future in your hands, because what has been said is true; the future depends upon the opinions of the men between twenty and thirty, which, I take it, is the average of the audience I have the honor of addressing. What is the condition of Ireland? Here, too, I will repeat what I said in Dublin. In Ireland you have a beggared gentry; a bewildered peasantry; a random and harsh and aimless system of government; a population fevered by political power and not sobered by political responsibility. This is what you have to deal with; and I say here, with a full sense of important responsibility, that rather than go on in face of that distracted picture, with the present hard, incoherent, cruel system of government in Ireland, rather than do that I would assent to the proposal that has been made, if that were the only alternative, by a great representative of the Unionist party, by Lord Grey.

And what does Lord Grey suggest? Lord Grey suggests that the Lord-Lieutenant should be appointed for ten years, and during those ten years-it is a strong order-during those ten years he is to make what laws he thinks fit without responsibility either to ministers or to Parliament. It is a strong order, but I declare-and I believe that Mr. Parnell has said that he agrees that I would rather see Ireland made a Crown colony to-morrow than go on in the present hypocritical and inefficient system of sham representation. You may then have the severity of paternal repression, but you will have the beneficence of paternal solicitude and supervision. What you now have is repression and neglect; and repression and neglect you will have until you call the Irish leaders into council and give to the majority of the Irish people that power in reality which now they have only in name.

One minute more and I will sit down.

The resolution raises very fairly the great issue that now divides and engages all serious minds in this country-the issue which has broken up a great political party, which has tried and tested more than one

splendid reputation, and in which the Liberal party have embarked all their hopes and fortunes as resolutely and as ungrudgingly as their forefathers did in the case of Catholic Emancipation. The opponents of this Resolution ought to have told us, what no opponent to-night did tell us-for I listened very carefully-they ought to have told us what it is they mean. Merely to vote a blank and naked negative to this resolution? It is not enough, it cannot be all, merely to say "No" to this resolution. You are not going through the familiar process of rejecting an academic motion or an abstract proposition.

In refusing this proposition you are adopting an amendment. I have taken the liberty to draft a Unionist amendment. I will gladly place it in the hands of any Unionist member who may think it expedient to move it. This is the alternative amendment to the resolution of the honorable mover.

"That, inasmuch as Coercion, after being tried in every form and under all varieties, has failed to bring to Ireland that order and content we all earnestly desire, Coercion shall be made the permanent law of the land; That as perfect equality between England and Ireland is the key to a sound policy, Coercion shall be the law in Ireland and shall not be the law in England; That as decentralization and local government have been long recognized and constantly promised as a necessary reform in Irish affairs, the time has at length arrived for definitely abandoning all reform in Irish local government; That since the backward condition, and the many admitted needs of Ireland urgently call for the earnest and unremitting attention of her rulers, the exclusive attention of this Parliament shall be devoted to the consideration of English, Scotch, and Welsh affairs; That, in view of the fact that representative institutions are the glory and strength of the United Kingdom, the Constitutional demands of the great majority of the Irish representatives shall be disregarded, and these representatives shall have no voice in Irish affairs and no share in Irish government; and, finally, That as Mr. Pitt declared the great object of the Union to be to make the Empire more secure by making Ireland more free and more happy, it is the duty of every true Unionist to make Ireland more miserable in order to prevent her from being free."

That, sir, is the amendment which you are, I fear, presently going to vote. [Cries of "No!"] Yes, you are. That is what you are going to vote, and I have failed in the speech which you have most kindly and indulgently listened to, if you do not see that that amendment, with its stream of paradoxes and incoherencies, represents the Unionist policy. That is a policy which judgment condemns and which conscience forbids.

§ 20

OPENING OF THE 1916 REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN

By Albert J. Beveridge

(Delivered at the Auditorium in Chicago, on the night of October 5, 1916.)

We are concerned not so much with the past as with the present and the future; we are interested, not so much in criticism as in construction. The task at hand and the word before us are big enough to engage our best thought and all our thought.

We must build for to-morrow and our plan must be as wide as the horizon now opening before us. A new world is being born. Just as the Napoleonic wars destroyed an outworn political dispensation, so the present conflict is ending an old economic system. In this new day, and amidst these changed conditions, there must be a new America. Let us be thankful and glad that we are privileged to lay its foundations.

This work means, first of all, a broader, deeper, stronger nationalism. The philosophy of localism is dead. The practice of it must no longer interfere with the unity of the Republic. National law and national authority must deal with all things that help or hurt the entire people.

Our railways in their management and service, are national. They are the highways of the Republic as a whole. The well-being of the entire American people depends upon the service they render, and the solvency of the railroads depends upon the common prosperity of the Nation. Yet American railways, unlike those of every other country, are under control of forty-eight local sovereignties, as well as that of the general government. Hundreds of conflicting state regulations and an army of state officials complicate their operation.

The plain remedy is to place the railways of the Nation under the exclusive control of the national government.

That is the national government should have the exclusive supervision and regulation of the railroads, and not the sovereign states.

They are vital to national defense. It is useless to train men unless they can be transported quickly and in immense numbers. In the confusion caused by our multiple and discordant control of the railways, we could not promptly transport so small an army as half a million men.

ALBERT JEREMIAH BEVERIDGE. Born in Highland County, Ohio, October 6, 1862; graduated from De Pauw University, 1885; United States Senator from Indiana, 1890-1911.