restriction or regulation, that he was living under any government but that of his own State.  If he went abroad he had to apply for a United States passport.  If he quarrelled with a foreigner, or with the citizen of another State, he might be sued in the Federal Court.  If he imported foreign goods he had to pay duties to the collector of a Federal Custom-house.  If he invented something, or wrote a book, he had to apply to the Department of the Interior for a patent or a copyright.  But how few there were in the first seventy years of American history who had any of these experiences!  No one supposes, or has ever supposed, that had the Federalists demanded any very large sacrifice of local franchises, or attempted to set up even a close approach to a centralized Government, the adoption of the Constitution would have been possible.  If, for instance, such a transfer of both administration and legislation to the central authority as took place in Ireland after the Union had been proposed, it would have been rejected with derision.  You will get no American to argue with you on this point.  If you ask him whether he thinks it likely that a highly centralized government could have been created in 1879—­such a one, for example, as Ireland has been under since 1800—­or whether if created it would by this time have won the affection of the people, or filled them with centripetal tendencies, he will answer you with a smile.

The truth is that nowhere, any more than in Ireland, do people love their Government from a sense of duty or because they crave an object of political affection, or even because it exalts them in the eyes of foreigners.  They love it because they are happy or prosperous under it; because it supplies security in the form best suited to their tastes and habits, or in some manner ministers to their self-love.  Loyalty to the king as the Lord’s anointed, without any sense either of favours received or expected, has played a great part in European politics, I admit; but, for reasons which I will not here take up space in stating, a political arrangement, whether it be an elected monarch or a constitution, cannot be made, in our day, to reign in men’s hearts except as the result of benefits so palpable that common people, as well as political philosophers, can see them and count them.

Many of the opponents of Home Rule, too, point to the vigour with which the United States Government put down the attempt made by the South to break up the Union as an example of the American love of “imperial unity,” and of the spirit in which England should now meet the Irish demands for local autonomy.  This again is rather surprising, because you will find no one in America who will maintain for one moment that troops could have been raised in 1860 to undertake the conquest of the South for the purpose of setting up a centralized administration, or, in other words, for the purpose of wiping out State lines, or diminishing State authority.  No man or party proposed anything