Page:The Irish Cause and "The Irish Convention".djvu/12

 make any exception whatever. I admit that the present situation in Ireland is one of mere chaos, and that nobody—literally no politician—is at the present moment in a position to answer for the action of the Irish people.

But it would be still not at all difficult to hit upon the names of a dozen eminent Irishmen—men of broadmindedness and imagination and toleration wide enough to embrace all political sects of our countrymen from the most moderate to the most extreme. If you could assemble a dozen such men around a friendly council table, they could be depended upon not to separate in such a crisis for our country without some great and memorable national agreement upon some such non-partitionist and Federationist lines as I have again and again indicated in this House and outside it. Let me add that the chances of an agreement would be all the better among all classes of Irishmen north and south the further the Conference would travel away from the existing Act upon the Statute-book, which has really become a bitter laughing-stock throughout the country.

Well, suppose you had an Irish agreement. We suggested as the second stage that it should be submitted to the Imperial Cabinet, including the Premiers of the Over Seas Dominions. For that tribunal there might now be substituted the hybrid committee of an Imperial character which the Prime Minister contemplated in case his Bill received a second reading under the presidency of some man of the type of Mr. Speaker, if indeed a second such man is to be found. Once you had secured an Irish agreement thus splendidly fortified, the democratic thing would be to submit it frankly by Referendum to the whole Irish people, and then 12