Note 7 — HOW WE BECAME HOME RULERS.

Some of us had tried to do so. I prepared such a scheme in the autumn of 1885, and submitted it to some specially competent friends. Their objections, made from what would now be called the Unionist point of view, were weighty. But their effect was to convince me that the scheme erred on the side of caution; and I believe the experience of other Liberals who worked at the problem to have been the same as my own—viz. that a small and timid scheme is more dangerous than a large and bold one. Thus the result of our thinking from July, 1885, till April, 1886, was to make us more and more disposed to reject half-and-half solutions. Some of us (of whom I was one) expressed this feeling by saying in our election addresses in 1885, "the further we go in giving the Irish people the management of their own affairs (subject to the maintenance of the unity of the empire) the better."