Mr. Madison’s challenge to the opponents of the American Constitution to agree on some plan of their own, and his humorous suggestion that if the American people had to wait for some such agreement to be reached they would go for a long time without a government, are curiously applicable to the opponents of Irish Home Rule.  They are very fertile in reasons for thinking that neither the Gladstone plan nor any other plan can succeed, but no two of them, so far as I know, have yet hit upon any other mode of pacifying Ireland, except the use of force for a certain period to maintain order, and oddly enough, even when they agree on this remedy, they are apt to disagree about the length of time during which it should be tried.

Mr. Dicey, in conceding the success of the American Constitution, seems to me unmindful, if I may use the expression, of the judgments he would probably have passed on it had it been submitted to him at the outset were he in the frame of mind to which a prolonged study of the Irish problem has now brought him.  The Supreme Court, for instance, which he now recognizes as an essential feature of the Federal Constitution, and the absence of which in the Gladstonian arrangement he treats as a fatal defect, would have undoubtedly appeared to him a preposterous contrivance.  It would have seemed to him impossible that a legislature like Congress, with the traditions of parliamentary omnipotence still strong in the minds of the members, would ever submit to have its acts nullified by a board composed of half a dozen elderly lawyers.  Nor would he have treated as any more reasonable the expectation that the State tribunals, which had existed in each colony from its foundation, and had earned the respect and confidence of the people, would quietly submit to have their jurisdiction curtailed, their decisions overruled, causes torn from their calendar, and prisoners taken out of their custody by new courts of semi-foreign origin, which the State neither paid nor controlled.  He would, too, very probably have been most incredulous about the prospect of the growth of loyalty on the part of New-Yorkers and Massachusetts men to a new-fangled government, which was to make itself only slightly felt in their daily lives, and was to sit a fortnight away in an improvised village in the midst of a Virginian forest.

He would, too, have ridiculed the notion that State legislatures would refrain, in obedience to the Constitution, from passing any law which local sentiment strongly favoured or local convenience plainly demanded, such as a law impairing the obligation of obnoxious contracts, or levying duties on imports or exports.  The possibility that the State militia could ever be got to obey federal officers, or form an efficient part of a federal army, he would have scouted.  On the feebleness of the front which federation would present to a foreign enemy he would have dwelt with emphasis, and would have pointed with confidence to the probability