Page:Home rule (Beesly).djvu/6

6 That is the way in which the poor blind giant is half inclined to consider the question." Yes, my superior friend, and very soon you will find him wholly inclined to consider it in that way. You can have no idea till you come to try it, how hard it will be to make him see what he gains by lending you his strength to hold India or Ireland. Your own case is clear enough. You know on which side your bread is buttered. Why should not he consider the question from the same point of view?

The workman is quite right in his suspicion, that the bigness of our Empire is an obstacle to the improvement of his condition. He has only to look at the debates of the House of Commons from the beginning of the session to the end. He will find that when the members are not occupied with Ireland, they are busy with Egypt or Afghanistan or South Africa; anything rather than the condition of English workmen. On wars in those distant lands, millions of money are squandered with hardly a show of opposition. But in a hard winter like that we have just passed through, when half our workmen are unemployed, Parliament has not a word to say or a penny to spare for them.

I will venture to quote here some words I wrote twenty years ago.

"The wealth, greatness, and glory of England have meant very little for the working man. Rather they have adjourned his emancipation. It is his interest—and it cannot be much longer concealed from him—that public attention should be concentrated on the state of England. The re-casting of our constitution, the redistribution of taxation, the substitution of a system of education for a state church, the limitation of proprietary rights in land, poor law reform, sanitary reform, legal reform, in a word the subordination of private interests to public utility—these are questions that cannot be dealt with even by public opinion while our energies and attention are wasted on the management of two hundred millions of people who do not belong to us. The direct, though not continuous, intervention of working men in the government of the country will be signalised by a refusal to let it be