It is the duty of every government to be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere justice through which the most ancient heavens abide fresh and strong.
And until these prime duties have been faithfully performed, no government need expect and none can exact "loyalty" from its subjects.
But it seems that we are compromised on other grounds.

The inscription on the Parnell Memorial is trumpeted about the constituencies with equal energy by opponents wise and otherwise: "No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.
No man has a right to say to his country, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.' We have never attempted to fix the _ne plus ultra_ to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall." What the precise matter of offence may be one finds it difficult to discover.

Mr Balfour very properly characterises as the utterance of a statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines to usurp the throne and sceptre of Providence.

But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home Rule of the note of "finality." With the suggestion that Home Rule is not at all events the end of the world we are, of course, in warm agreement.

But if Mr Smith has entered public affairs in pursuit of static formulae for dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world to gratify such desires.