much-desired projects are put off from session to session or passed in such a weakened form as to be of little value.
Assuming, then, that there is a general consensus that extensive modifications of our existing legislative and administrative system are urgently required, all the indications seem to show that the present time offers an exceptional opportunity for dealing with them. The results of the war call for new departures in many directions, for which our existing machinery is unsuitable and inadequate, and public opinion daily tends more and more to look for a remedy to the devolution of powers legislative or administrative, or both, now exercised by Parliament, to subordinate Assemblies on the principle of the relations of the American States to the Federal Government.
As already stated, the present writer sees no other—at all events no better—way of escape from the perennial Irish difficulty, nor any that can be effected without intolerable coercion, not of the seditious, but of the loyal and orderly portion of the population, and which might be expected to be permanent, otherwise than through the federal principle.
The proposal of an independent Irish Republic may be dismissed at once. No section of the British Commonwealth is prepared to entertain it. Whatever may be the expectations or hopes of the Sinn Fein leaders, it is probable that the rank and file of their followers have but the haziest notions as to the difference between a Republic and any other form of self-government, and adopted the cry, as an effective demonstration of disloyalty to the existing order, and particularly of their determined hostility to conscription. On the other hand the Convention of 1917–18, from which so much was hoped for, was unable to formulate a workable scheme or to indicate any method of overcoming the Ulster difficulty.
At the present time the cry is all for "Dominion Home Rule"; but what exactly is meant by Dominion Home
