The Present Status of the Home Rule Question1

Bibliographical Note.—Obviously it is impossible to give a definite authority for many of the statements made in an article of this sort. I have, for the most part, therefore, omitted any footnotes whatever. Naturally I have used such standard works as Lecky, whose chapters on Irish questions I have found to be based on a more thorough research than those dealing with purely British affairs, and Morley's Gladstone. I have consulted, as well, the various parliamentary papers and reports relating to the Home Rule bills of 1886, 1893, and 1912. One of the most useful expositions of Mr. Asquith's bill is the series of papers edited for the Eighty Club by Prof. J. H. Morgan, and recently published under the title, “The New Irish Constitution.” I need scarcely mention that I have referred to Dicey's “England's Case Against Home Rule” and “A Leap in the Dark”; the Earl of Dunraven's “The Legacy of Past Years”; G. Locker Lampson's “A Consideration on the State of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century”; Justin H. McCarthy's “The Case for Home Rule”; Sidney Brooks' “Aspectsof the Irish Question”; Harold Begbie's “The Lady Next Door”; R. Barry O'Brien's “Life of Charles Stewart Parnell,” “Dublin Castle and the Irish People,” “Two Centuries of Irish History,” “Home Rule Speeches of John Redmond,” and other similar works.