As to England.--The presence of the Irish members at Westminster is on the face of it a gross and patent injustice to Great Britain. It is absurd, it is monstrous, that while the Irish Parliament and the Irish Parliament alone settle whether Mr. Healy, Mr. M'Carthy, Mr. Redmond, or Mr. Davitt is to be head of the Irish government, and England, though vitally interested in the character of the Irish Executive, is not to say a word in the matter, eighty Irishmen are to help in determining, and are often actually to determine, whether Lord Salisbury or Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Balfour or Mr. Chamberlain, is to be Prime Minister and direct the policy of England. Here again 1 can rely on the invaluable aid of Mr. Morley. He has denounced the effect on England of retaining Irish members at Westminster with a strength of language and a weight of authority to which it is impossible for me to make any pretension.
'But there is a word to be said about the effect on our own Parliament, and I think the effect of such an arrangement--and I cannot help thinking so till I hear of better arrangements--upon our own Parliament would be worse still. It is very easy to talk about reducing the number of the Irish members; perhaps it would not be so easy to do. It is very easy to talk about letting them take part in some questions and not in others, but it will be very difficult when you come to draw the line in theory between the questions in which they shall take a part and those in which they shall not take a part. But I do not care what precautions you take; I do not care where you draw the line in theory; but you may depend upon it--I predict--that there is no power on the earth that can prevent the Irish members in such circumstances from being in the future Parliament what they were in the past, and what to some extent they are in the present, the arbiters and the masters of English policy, of English legislative business, and of the rise and fall of British Administrations. You will have weakened by the withdrawal of able men the Legislature of Dublin, and you will have demoralized the Legislature at Westminster. We know very well what that demoralisation means, for I beg you to mark attentively the use to which the Irish members would inevitably put their votes--inevitably and naturally. Those who make most of the retention of the Irish members at Westminster are also those who make most of there being what they call a real and effective and a freely and constantly exercised veto at Westminster upon the doings at Dublin. You see the position. A legislative body in Dublin passes a Bill. The idea is that that Bill is to lie upon the table of the two Houses of Parliament in London for forty days--forty days in the wilderness. What does that mean? It means this, that every question that had been fought out in Ireland would be fought out over again by the Irish members in our Parliament. It means that the House of Lords here would throw out pretty nearly every Bill that was passed at Dublin. What would be the result of that? You would have the present block of our business. You would have all the present irritation and exasperation. English work would not be done; Irish feeling would not be conciliated, but would be exasperated. The whole efforts of the Irish members would be devoted to throwing their weight--I do not blame them for this--first to one party and then to another until they had compelled the removal of these provoking barriers, restrictions, and limitations which ought never to have been set up. I cannot think, for my part I cannot see, how an arrangement of that sort promises well either for the condition of Ireland or for our Parliament. If anybody, in my opinion, were to move an amendment to our Bill in the House of Commons in such a direction as this, with all these consequences foreseen, I do not believe such an amendment would find twenty supporters.'[44]