Professor Dicey wrote a Unionist tract, very vehement and thunderous, in which he sought to injure Home Rule by styling it a leap in the dark.

But the whole conduct of life, in its gravest and its lightest issues alike, is a perpetual leap in the dark.

Every change of public policy is a raid across the frontiers of the unknown; or rather, as I prefer to put it, every fundamental reform is essentially an Act of Faith in to-morrow, and so it is with Home Rule.
But while none of us can prophesy all of us can conjecture, and in this case with a great deal of confidence.

On the one hand, Ireland is a country of very definite habits of thought; on the other, her immediate problems are obvious.

These two circumstances facilitate the process which the learned describe as an attempt to produce the present curve of evolution into the future.