I must say that I for one am very sorry to think that the Irish
question is gone. We shall miss it greatly. Debating societies
which have flourished on it ever since 1886 will be wrecked for
want of it. Dinner parties will now lose half the sparkle of their
conversation. It will be no longer possible to make use of such
good old remarks as, "After all the Irish are a gifted people,"
or, "You must remember that fifty per cent of the great English
generals were Irish."

The settlement turned out to be a very simple affair. Ireland was
merely given dominion status. What that is, no one knows, but it
means that the Irish have now got it and that they sink from the
high place that they had in the white light of publicity to the
level of the Canadians or the New Zealanders.

Whether it is quite a proper thing to settle trouble by conferring
dominion status on it, is open to question. It is a practice that
is bound to spread. It is rumoured that it is now contemplated to
confer dominion status upon the Borough of Poplar and on the
Cambridge undergraduates. It is even understood that at the recent
disarmament conference England offered to confer dominion status
on the United States. President Harding would assuredly have accepted
it at once but for the protest of Mr. Briand, who claimed that any
such offer must be accompanied by a permission to increase the
French fire-brigade by fifty per cent.

It is lamentable, too, that at the very same moment when the Irish
question was extinguished, the Naval Question which had lasted for
nearly fifty years was absolutely obliterated by disarmament.
Henceforth the alarm of invasion is a thing of the past and the navy