Home Rulers would be the first to resist these decisions (p. 185).  Irish federation “would soon generate a demand that the whole British Empire should be turned into a Confederacy” (p. 188).  Finally, as “the one prediction which may be made with absolute confidence,” “federalism would not generate the goodwill between England and Ireland which, could it be produced, would be an adequate compensation even for the evils and inconveniences of a federal system” (p. 191).

Now I do not myself believe these things, but what else can any advocate of Home Rule say in answer to them?  They are in their very nature the utterances of a prophet—­an able, acute, and fair-minded prophet, I grant, but still a prophet—­and before a prophet the wisest man has to be silent, or content himself by answering in prophecy also.  What makes the sceptical frame of mind in which Mr. Dicey approaches the Home Rule question so important is not simply that it probably represents that of a very large body of educated Englishmen, but that it is one in which a federal system cannot be produced.  Faith, hope, and charity are political as well as social virtues.  The minute you leave the region of pure despotism and try any form of government in which the citizen has in the smallest degree to co-operate in the execution of the laws, you have need of these virtues at every step.  As soon as you give up the attempt to rule men by drumhead justice, you have to begin to trust in some degree to their intelligence, to their love of order, to their self-respect, and to their desire for material prosperity, and the nearer you get to what is called free government the larger this trust has to be.  It has to be very large indeed in order to carry on such a government as that of Great Britain or of the United States; it has to be larger still in order to set up and administer a federal government.  In such a government the worst that can happen is very patent.  The opportunities which the best-drawn federal constitution offers for outbreaks of what Americans call “pure cussedness”—­that is, for the indulgence of anarchical tendencies and impulses—­is greater than in any other.  Therefore, to set it up, or even to discuss it with any profit, your faith in the particular variety of human nature, which is to live under it, has to be great.  No communities can live under it together and make it work which do not respect each other.  I say respect, I do not say love, each other.  The machine can be made to go a good while without love, and if it goes well it will bring love before long; but mutual respect is necessary from the first day.  This is why Mr. Dicey’s book is discouraging.  The arguments which he addressed to Englishmen would not, I think, be formidable but for the mood in which he finds Englishmen, and that this mood makes against Home Rule there can be little doubt.