in any arrangement whatever between England and Ireland.  It is in the strictest sense impossible that Ireland whilst forming part of the United Kingdom, or even of the British Empire, should enjoy or endure the independence of Victoria.  If the Act which gives Victoria her constitution were reenacted with the necessary verbal changes for Ireland, the constitution which satisfies the Victorians would not satisfy the Irish, and for a good reason:  the form would be the same, but the effect would be different.  A suffering and discontented people will not accept words for facts.

One condition indeed, which more perhaps than any other ensures the success of our Colonial system, Great Britain has in the case of Ireland the power to reproduce.  Immunity from Imperial taxation is one source of Colonial loyalty to the Empire.  If Ireland is to accept or to receive the mixed independence and subordination of a colony, she ought to enjoy the substantial advantage of a theoretically inferior position.  The Colonial system, as I have already insisted, involves the renunciation of Imperial taxation.

[Sidenote:  3.  Home Rule as Constitution of 1782.]

Home Rule as the revival of Grattan’s Constitution is an impossibility.  The Constitution of 1782 belongs to a past age, and cannot by any miracle of political art be at the present day restored to life.

[Sidenote:  4.  Home Rule as Gladstonian Constitution.]

Home Rule under the Gladstonian Constitution means an artificial combination of Federalism and Colonialism.  Its aim is to secure the advantages of two opposite systems; its result is to combine and intensify the disadvantages of both systems.  It inevitably tends towards the dissolution of the United Kingdom into a Federation; it immediately disturbs the bases of the Constitution by creating the artificial bond of something like a Federal legislature between England and Ireland; it introduces into the relations between each of the different divisions of the United Kingdom elements of conflict which are all but inherent in Federalism; it requires that absolute deference for the judicial decisions of a Federal Court which if it exist anywhere can exist only among a people like the Americans, imbued with legal notions, and as it were born with innate respect for law.  That this sentiment cannot exist in Ireland is certain; whether it exist in the required intensity even in England is problematical.  The Gladstonian Constitution, again, because it contains some institutions borrowed from the Colonial system without the conditions requisite for their proper working so to speak falsifies them.  The Imperial supremacy of Great Britain, the Imperial control over the army, the occasional interference with the Irish executive and the veto of the Crown on Irish legislation, are each and all of them under the Gladstonian Constitution certain to be the source of justifiable dissatisfaction.  To the ingenuity of the plan proposed by Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry