not to be adopted except in the case of animals likely to be suitable for gun-teams. (5) Any horses in the ranks which are adjudged to be unfit for active service (unless the unfitness be merely temporary) should be cast and replaced. (6) The existing arrangement of paying a registrationfee to certain horse owners should be extended so as to provide for the whole of the remounts required to mobilise the Expeditionary Force outside of Ireland, the fee should be raised to £1 per annum, and the contract should make the owners responsible for producing the animals at specified places. (7) Provision has to be made for creating a reserve of horses intended to make the wastage in the Expeditionary Force good, and also for filling up the depôts and the spare units of regular troops left behind. If the numbers required have been calculated, the figures ought to be made public; the 44,000 remounts required to mobilise the Expeditionary Force and the 86,000 required by the Territorials do not represent the total number necessary. (8) In respect to the mobilisation of the Territorial Forces, it seems worthy of consideration whether its field artillery might not be horsed with the ordinary, heavy, farm horses which are common in the agricultural districts of England, only four of them being used for the team. But in any case the subject requires to be taken in hand with a vigour which at present is conspicuous by its absence, and when difficulties are sought for they ought only to be sought for with the object of deciding promptly how they are to be overcome. Procrastination in connection with a matter of such vital importance is scarcely less mischievous than precipitation. That timehonoured, dilatory, War Office system of "considering" may be silvern; but action is golden, and the position of affairs at present can perhaps be best summed up in the expressive sporting aphorism, "Get on or get out. HOME RULE FOR IRELAND. THERE are some measures brought before Parliament which may be supported or opposed on their merits, and without reference to the previous speeches and "convictions" of their authors. The approval of the country may overshadow past indiscretions. The purpose of supposed amelioration may for the moment appear sincere, and there may be left to the Opposition the sole duty of opposing the Bill before the House in forgetfulness of its origins. The events which have preceded the introduction of the Home Rule Bill do not permit us to accept the good faith of its begetters. We must scrutinise not only the Bill, which is bad enough, but the intentions of the two men who are mainly responsible for it, which are still worse. For let it be remembered that in this disruption of the Empire the country takes no part. Its opinion has not been asked, and if Mr Asquith has his way, its opinion will not be asked. The democracy, whose praise is ever upon the slavish lips of the Radicals, is bidden to stand aside. There are two parties to the contract, and two alone Mr Asquith, who represents the Cabinet, and Mr Redmond, who represents the dollars of America. These are the men who chaffer for the fate of the United Kingdom, and we shall not understand the present bargain, which they have made, unless we consider for a moment their action in the past. Mr Asquith has never been an ardent Home Ruler. For twenty years he has not mentioned the perilous subject in an election address. His chief contribution to the controversy is an expressed belief that no House of Commons should grant Home Rule to Ireland unless it contained a majority in favour of the change, independent of the Irish Nationalists. When he was master of a British majority, he forgot that Ireland had ever clamoured to be "free.” It was only when the support of Mr Redmond's eighty henchmen was necessary to his existence that his conscience pricked him. Straightway he forgot his previously expressed belief. He "toed the line with an obvious anxiety, and began the process of bargaining, which has thrown eternal discredit upon the House of Commons. The exchange was made in the sight of all men. Mr Redmond supported a budget of which he did approve, and abolished the House of Lords, which nothing to him, and Mr Asquith grants in recompense a measure of Home Rule. Yet when the Leader of the Opposition charges Mr Asquith with "turning the House of Commons into a market-place," the Prime Minister holds up his hands in pious horror. "What not was have I to gain," he asks virtuously, "and what have my colleagues to gain?" They have gained the support of eighty henchmen and some years of office. And we cannot imagine any advantage nearer to their hearts. Mr Asquith, then, has become reluctantly a Home Ruler to win Mr Redmond's support. Mr Redmond has wept salt tears over the union of hearts, that he may beguile the electors of Great Britain. Like the King of the Cannibal Islands, when he saw a British tar unlimber his wooden leg, he thanks God "personally that he has lived to see this day. He asks nothing better than the friendship of England. He was not always thus amicably inspired. His ancient speeches, which he would gladly bury in oblivion, are packed with rancour and fury. Five years ago, he sent England this message from New Ross: "We, to-day, hate her just as bitterly as our forefathers did when they shed their blood on this spot. We tell her that we are as much rebels to-day as our forefathers were in '98." Now, either Mr Redmond believed those burning words, when he uttered them, or he deemed it expedient to utter them. Whichever alternative be true matters not a jot. If he believed them five brief years ago, what faith shall we put in the unctuous platitudes of noble temper and goodwill which he poured forth upon the House of Commons? If they were a mere concession to expediency, what guarantee have we that they will not be spoken again to-morrow? An audience may demand a "message of hate," and if it do, Mr Redmond will, we are sure, be ever ready to accommodate it. In this matter of Home Rule, then, Mr Asquith and Mr Redmond, the chief bargainers, are both convicted of insincerity. They, at any rate, are not competent, as their past shows, to destroy the United Kingdom. And if the auspices are evil, what shall we say of the Bill itself? Never was there such a hotch-potch of safeguards and concessions. It is evident in every line that those who concocted it never once asked themselves: Is it a bill that will benefit Ireland and the Empire? The irrelevant questions they put were no doubt as follows: Have we conciliated every waverer? Is there left any loophole by which votes can escape? And having found for themselves a satisfactory answer to these burning questions, they attempt to force upon us this thing of shreds and patches, which they pretend is a first step towards federalism, but which all sane men will recognise as a mere halting-place upon the road of separation. Mr Asquith is already an adept at what Sir Edward Carson called "lying preambles," and not a single member of the Opposition will put a moment's trust in the systems of Home Rule for England, Scotland, and Wales which are to follow. These systems have already joined that reformed Second Chamber safeguard against oppression. which Mr Asquith's "honour" The Nationalists, at any rate, pledges him to construct. We are under no illusion. They must assume, therefore, that have already snapped their the discussion of federalism, fingers in contempt at the mere which filled a large part of prospect of guarantees. "I tell Mr Asquith's speech, was in- these men, "said the Member tended merely to strengthen for East Mayo of the landlords the waverers; and we must last October, "that the sands accept the Home Rule Bill as in the hour-glass are running a thing, separate and by it- out fast. Home Rule is comself, given in payment for ing, and we will get it whether services rendered by eighty they like it or not; and when Nationalists. Looked at from Home Rule has come, and there this point of view, it is, as is an Irish Parliament sitting Sir Edward Carson said, in Dublin, I do not think they "ridiculous and fantastic." will get English Ministers to The Lower House of 164 trouble themselves much about members, the Senate of 40, their woes in future. They which will presently meet at will make their bed with the Dublin, though financially people of Ireland, and, be it pensioners upon England's short or long, they will have to bounty, will exercise supreme lie on that bed. It is better authority over the whole of for them to make friends with Ireland. The safeguards pro- their own people while there posed by Mr Asquith are not is yet time." There is little worth the paper on which thought of guarantees in these they are written. The first words, which represent the clause, which should surely truth far more nearly than Mr have been a preamble, states Asquith's sophistries or the that "the supreme power and Pecksniffian humility of Mr authority of the Parliament of Redmond. Assuredly English the United Kingdom shall re- Ministers will refuse to intermain unaffected and undimin- fere between oppressors and ished." These words express oppressed, when once the Irish a pious hope and no more. Parliament is called into being. Of what use are guarantees "There were some centuries," when they cannot be applied? said Mr Balfour in a speech "In the first place," said Mr which tore the pretentious Bill Asquith solemnly, "there is the to ribbons, "in which our veto of the Lord-Lieutenant "; British sovereigns described and then there is an appeal themselves as Kings of France. to the Irish Court, and, if It appeared on all their coins, that be not satisfactory, to it appeared in all their formal the Judicial Committee of the State documents, but it did Privy Council. Surely no one is not make them Kings of so foolishly sanguine as to believe France. They could not order that in these guarantees of ink an office boy about on the other and paper there is the smallest side of the Channel, and the power of our sovereigns as Kings of France is exactly on a parallel with that supremacy of the British Parliament about which you talk so much, about which you give such flamboyant directions to your draftsmen, and which you know as well as I do, as practical politicians, never can be exercised in any critical moment when its exercise might be necessary." That is all that need be said concerning guarantees. They are devised merely to hold the party together, and then they may take their place in a museum of political archæology. If the pretence of guarantees be fantastic, fantastic also is the composition of the Senate, the Forty Thieves, as they are already called in Dublin. Here again Mr Asquith deals with words, and with words alone. The Senate is to be nominated, in the first instance, by the Imperial Executive, and afterwards by the Irish Executive itself. And the Senate is to be nominated, says Mr Asquith blandly, because "it is most desirable to get in your Senate, if you can, the representatives of the minority, of persons who will safeguard the interests of the minoritypersons who might not or who will not have a fair chance of election in a question of popular election." If these not very elegant phrases mean anything, they mean that Mr Redmond may be relied upon to temper his tyranny by nominating to the Irish Senate those whose interests he means to attack. Has Mr Asquith sur rendered also, as part of the bargain, the last shreds of his sense of humour? Were it not a tragedy for many thousands of Irishmen, we might laugh at this amateur's attempt to make a constitution. But not even the well-trained majority, which depends for its stipend of £400 a-piece upon the nod of Mr Redmond, will accept this last piece of hypocrisy, and there are already rumours that the constitution of the Senate shall be changed. Has not that cultured statesman, Mr T. P. O'Connor, already professed his readiness to "do a deal"? And at the same time that we proclaim Ireland a "nation," we are to confess without sorrow or shame that she is an insolvent nation. She is to be free not merely to manage her own affairs and to oppress Ulster, but to put her hands in the British till. Old Age Pensions, an infinitely heavier burden in Ireland than in England, remains an imperial charge. The land purchase scheme will still be managed and paid for by Great Britain. The onerous duty of taxgathering will most kindly be discharged by the complacent and no longer predominant partner. The round sum of £2,000,000 a-year is to be a free gift to the Irish, who henceforth will be protected for nothing by the Army and Navy of Great Britain, and who will incur no further responsibility for the National Debt. Ireland, in brief, shall tread the primrose path. She will be released from the burden of making |