They conceive, in short, that it is possible to confer a substantial benefit upon the Irish people, and to close a dangerous agitation, by giving to Belfast and to Cork the same municipal privileges which they wish to extend to Birmingham or to Liverpool.

The reasons for this belief are threefold: that Local Self-Government is itself a benefit; that Ireland ought, as of right, to have the same institutions as England; that Local or Municipal Self-Government will meet the real if not the nominal wish of the Irish people.

This hope I believe to be delusive.

The reasons on which it is grounded are--one of them probably, and two of them certainly--unsound.
Local Self-Government is one of those arrangements which, like most political institutions, cannot be called absolutely good or bad.

It is a good thing, I suppose, at Birmingham, and was some fifty years ago a good thing in Massachusetts, and it may prove (though this is speculation) a good thing in an English county.