an impossibility. The Constitution of 1782 belongs

3. Home

Rule as Constitution of 1782.

4. Home Rule as Gladston

tution.

to a past age, and cannot by any miracle of political art be at the present day restored to life.

Home Rule under the Gladstonian Constitution means an artificial combination of Federalism and Colonialism. Its aim is to secure the advanian Consti- tages of two opposite systems; its result is to combine and intensify the disadvantages of both systems. It inevitably tends towards the dissolution of the United Kingdom into a Federation; it immediately disturbs the bases of the Constitution by creating the artificial bond of something like a Federal legislature between England and Ireland; it introduces into the relations between each of the different divisions of the United Kingdom elements of conflict which are all but inherent in Federalism; it requires that absolute deference for the judicial decisions of a Federal Court which if it exist anywhere can exist only among a people like the Americans, imbued with legal notions, and as it were born with innate respect for law. That this sentiment cannot exist in Ireland is certain; whether it exist in the required intensity even in England is problematical. The Gladstonian Constitution, again, because it contains some institutions borrowed from the Colonial system without the conditions requisite for their proper working so to speak falsifies them. The Imperial supremacy of Great

Britain, the Imperial control over the army, the occasional interference with the Irish executive and the veto of the Crown on Irish legislation, are each and all of them under the Gladstonian Constitution certain to be the source of justifiable dissatisfaction. To the ingenuity of the plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone's Ministry hostile critics have given insufficient praise. But the essential unreality which this ingenuity has concealed has not even yet met with due condemnation. Since the day when the National Assembly of France presented the brand-new French Constitution to the acceptance of Louis XVI. no form of government has ever been seriously proposed for adoption by an intelligent people so radically unworkable as that Gladstonian Constitution which has been instinctively rejected by the good sense of the British Parliament. The Constitution of France lasted out two years; to a jurist it may appear conceivable, though hardly probable, that by the vigorous aid of the British Parliament the new Constitution for the United Kingdom might have lasted for as long a period.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUSION.

LET us here review and summarise our argument.

Survey of argument.

The demand for Home Rule is a demand for a change in the Constitution so fundamental as to amount to a legal and pacific revolution; such a demand requires for its support cogent, we may almost say conclusive, reasons.

The positive arguments in favour of Home Rule are not easy to grasp. Their strength lies in their correspondence with the prevailing opinions of the day. But though public opinion under any form of government, and especially under the system of what is called popular government, deserves great consideration, still the value of a prevailing belief or conviction cannot be determined without examining the elements which have gone to its production. The state of opinion which favours Home Rule is found to result from various and even self-contradictory feelings, some of which belong to the highest and some to the lowest parts of human nature; humanity and a sense of justice are in this instance curiously combined

with indolence and impatience. The arguments again for Home Rule rest upon one dubious assumption and one undoubted fact. The dubious assumption is that the root of Irish discontent is the outraged feeling of nationality. The undoubted fact is that in Ireland, on all matters either directly or even remotely connected with the tenure of land, the law of the Courts is opposed to the customs, to the moral sentiment, we may say to the law of the people; hence the Queen's tribunals are weak because they are not supported by that popular assent whence judges derive half their authority; the tribunals of the League are strong because their decisions commend themselves to the traditional feeling of the people. But the doubtful hypothesis and the undoubted fact, though one or other of them lies at the basis of all the strongest arguments in favour of Home Rule, each invalidate almost as much as they support the contention that an Irish Parliament will prove the specific for the diseases (due in the first instance to the original vice of the connection between England and Ireland) under which Irish society now suffers. If the passion of nationality is the cause of the malady, then the proposed cure is useless, for Home Rule will not turn the people of Ireland into a nation. If a vicious system of land tenure is the cause of lawlessness, then the restoration or re-creation of an Irish Parliament is needless, for the Parliament of the United Kingdom can reform, and ought to reform, the land system of Ireland, and ought to be able to carry through a final

settlement of agrarian disputes with less injustice to individuals than could any Parliament sitting at Dublin.

Reasoning, however, which fails to establish the expediency of creating an Irish Parliament may prove, and in fact does amply prove, that the task of maintaining peace order and freedom in Ireland is at the present juncture a matter of supreme difficulty. Any possible course, moreover, open to English statesmanship involves gigantic inconvenience, not to say tremendous perils. A man involved practically in the conduct of public affairs may easily bring himself to believe that the policy which he recommends is not only the best possible under the circumstances, but is also open to no serious objection. Outsiders, who in this matter are better because more impartial judges than the ablest of politicians, know that this is not so. We have nothing before us but a choice of difficulties or of evils. Every course is open to valid criticism.

The maintenance of the Union must necessarily turn out as severe a task as ever taxed a nation's energies, for to maintain the Treaty of Union with any good effect means that while refusing to accede to the wishes of millions of Irishmen, we must sedulously do justice to every fair demand from Ireland, must strenuously and without either fear or favour assert the equal rights of landlords and tenants, of Protestants and Catholics, and must at the same time put down every outrage and reform every abuse.

To carry out by peaceful means the political separation