Page:Home rule through federal devolution.djvu/13



Y common consent the problem of Irish Government is at once the most urgent and the most complex of all the dilemmas which face the statesmen of Britain. Englishmen are at last convinced that it cannot be satisfactorily dealt with by any generalisation, on a priori principles, or purely British ideas, but must be settled by Irish ideas, in accordance with Irish traditions, and especially by an intimate grasp of the facts and realities of Ireland. I venture to ask consideration for a mature and weighty study of the facts of Ireland to-day by an Irish thinker, of business experience, independent of party, faction, or religious prejudice.

The writer of the following essay, Frederic William Pim, of Dublin, has been engaged in mercantile and manufacturing business in Dublin for more than half a century. He is a director, and was for twenty years, from 1896 to 1916, the Chairman of the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway Company. He has published his views on Private Bill Legislation, and other questions of administration, and his work on The Railways and the State, 1912, is a masterly treatment of the question now so urgent. He is therefore familiar with the political and economical circumstances, historical and practical, of Ireland.

Mr. Pim is not personally known to me, except by a correspondence on Irish affairs, containing comments from time to time on the current events of the day, which I have valued for the information they conveyed on a subject in which I have taken a life-long, deep, and constant interest. I have no connection with him, his family, or his friends. Though of pure Irish race on my 7