every local body in Ireland, would not affect the relation between the people of Ireland and the Parliament at Westminster.  The very aim of Home Rule, even under its least pretentious form, is to introduce a new relation between the people of Ireland and the Parliament at Westminster.  The matter may be summed up in one phrase:  Local Self-Government however extended means the delegation, Home Rule however curtailed means the surrender, of Parliamentary authority.

[Sidenote:  Local Self-Government.]

The distinction here insisted upon is of practical importance, for it is connected with a question so pressing as to excuse an apparent, though not more than an apparent, digression.

English Radicals, and many politicians who are not Radicals, hold, whether rightly or not, that the sphere of Local Self-Government may with benefit to the nation be greatly extended in England.  The soundness of this view in no way concerns us, and it is a matter upon which there is no reason, for our present purpose, to form or express an opinion; they also hope that by a similar extension of Local Self-Government to Ireland they may satisfy the demand for Home Rule.  They conceive, in short, that it is possible to confer a substantial benefit upon the Irish people, and to close a dangerous agitation, by giving to Belfast and to Cork the same municipal privileges which they wish to extend to Birmingham or to Liverpool.  The reasons for this belief are threefold:  that Local Self-Government is itself a benefit; that Ireland ought, as of right, to have the same institutions as England; that Local or Municipal Self-Government will meet the real if not the nominal wish of the Irish people.  This hope I believe to be delusive.  The reasons on which it is grounded are—­one of them probably, and two of them certainly—­unsound.

Local Self-Government is one of those arrangements which, like most political institutions, cannot be called absolutely good or bad.  It is a good thing, I suppose, at Birmingham, and was some fifty years ago a good thing in Massachusetts, and it may prove (though this is speculation) a good thing in an English county.  Local Self-Government is not admirable at New York; it works less well than it once did in New England; it does not produce very happy effects in London parishes; we may well doubt whether it be really suited for modern France.  Local Self-Government where it flourishes is quite as much a result as a cause of a happy social condition; the eulogies bestowed upon it contain a curious mixture of truth and falsehood.  What is true is, that where self-government flourishes, society is in a sound state; what is false is, that Local Self-Government produces a sound state of society.  The primary condition necessary for the success of self-government is harmony between different classes.  The rich must be the guides of the poor, the poor must put trust in the rich.  Men who are placed above corruption must interest themselves in the laborious