Are you quite sure that the gist of the demand for Home Rule in Ireland, and in a less degree in Scotland, does not come mainly from young men who are agitating, though they do not fully realise it, for equality of opportunity rather than against the assumed wickedness of England? The Bohemians have achieved a very remarkable economic prosperity under the Austrian tyranny, and yet they fight for their Czecho-Slovak Nationality. Is there not something of the same human truth in the refractoriness of the shop stewards in our factories against the Union Executives away in London offices?
It is the principle of laissez-faire which has played such havoc with our local life. For a hundred years we have bowed down before the Going Concern as though it were an irreistible God. Undoubtedly it is a Reality, but it can be bent to your service if you have a policy inspired by an ideal. Laissez-faire was no such policy; it was mere surrender to fate. You tell me that centralisation is the 'tendency' of the age: I reply to you that it is the blind tendency of every age—was it not said nineteen hundred years ago that 'to him that hath shall be given'?
Consider the growth of London. A population of a million a century ago has risen to
