treating the question of Home Rule is necessarily lifeless when
compared with the vehement rhetoric or heated eloquence which
characterises public or parliamentary discussion; it is also true that
the argumentative treatment of matters affecting actual life always
bears about it a certain air of unreality.

If, however, systematic argument lacks the animation of political
discussion or dispute, it possesses its own counterbalancing merits, and
the mode of treating Home Rule purposely adopted in these pages has, it
is conceived, two not inconsiderable advantages. The first of these
advantages is that it diverts the mind from a crowd of personal,
temporary, and in themselves trivial considerations, which, though they
possess not only an apparent but also a real significance, are at bottom
irrelevant to the final decision of the true points at issue. Whether,
for example, Mr. Gladstone ought to have proclaimed himself a Home Ruler
before the elections of 1885, whether Lord Salisbury's reference, or
alleged reference, to twenty years of coercion was or was not judicious,
and did or did not receive a fair interpretation from his opponents;
whether Lord Carnarvon misled Mr. Parnell, or whether the Irish leader
was a dupe to his own astuteness; whether Mr. Chamberlain ought to have
joined the late Ministry, or, having gone into the Cabinet, ought never
to have left it; what have been the motives consciously or unconsciously
affecting Mr. Gladstone's course of action--these and a hundred other
enquiries of the like sort, which engage the attention and distract the
judgment of the public, possess, in the eyes of any serious thinker
occupied in estimating the strength of the arguments for and against
Home Rule, no material importance whatever. His concern is the merit or
demerit of a legislative enactment. He is not concerned at all with the
conduct or the character of legislators. Mr. Gladstone's motives may be
the highest which can be ascribed to the Premier by the voice of