controlled by George the Third and his English Ministers, and the passing of the Act of Union was proof, if evidence were needed, that England possessed potent though unavowed means for controlling the decision of the Irish Legislature.  The Constitution, it may be added, bore exactly the fruit to be expected from its anomalous character.  It stimulated national feeling; this was its saving merit.  It did not secure supremacy to the will of the Irish nation; this, as appeared in 1800, was its fatal flaw.  Compare with this the Constitution of Victoria.  The Victorian Constitution is based on complete acknowledgment of English Parliamentary sovereignty.  But the amplest recognition of British authority is balanced by the unrestricted enjoyment of local self-government.  Hence Victoria manages her own affairs, but Victorians are not inspired with the sense of constituting a nation.

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[Sidenote:  Gladstonian Constitution—­its character.]

IV. Home Rule under the Gladstonian Constitution[53]—­No legislative proposal submitted to Parliament has ever received harder measure than the Government of Ireland Bill.  Its introduction aroused the keenest political battle which during half a century has been fought in England.  The Bill therefore became at once the mark of hostile and (what is nearly the same thing) of unfair criticism at the hands of opponents.  This was to be expected; it is the necessary result of the system which makes tenure of office depend on success in carrying through or resisting proposed legislation.  What did take place but was not to be expected was, that the Government of Ireland Bill met with harsh criticism at the hands of its friends.  The Opposition wished to prove that the principle of the Bill was bad, by showing that it led to disastrous and absurd results.  They therefore directed their assaults upon the details of a measure which they disliked in reality not because of the special provisions which they attacked, but because of the principle to which these provisions gave effect.  Ministeralists on the other hand were only too ready to surrender any clause in the Bill as a matter of detail, provided only they could persuade Parliament to sanction the principle of the measure, and thereby affirm the policy of giving Ireland an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament.  Nor was this course of action dictated solely by the exigencies of Parliamentary strategy.  Ministerialists saw the flaws in the Bill as plainly as did the Opposition, and no man (it may be conjectured), from the Premier who devised, down to the draughtsman who drew, the Government of Ireland Bill, would have wished it to become an Act in the form in which it stood on the 7th day of June, 1886.  The supporters, moreover, of the Government emphasized their dislike to the details of the particular measure, because to attack a detail of the machinery by which it was proposed to give Ireland Home Rule countenanced in