sovereigns, with its kings, princes, and free towns, is something to which there is absolutely nothing to correspond in the present condition or in the historical development of England.  The German Empire is the natural though strange growth of a special and strange history.  The sober English statesmen who advocate Home Rule assuredly never dreamt any dream so wild as that the Imperial Federalism of Germany could in any way be reproduced in the United Kingdom.  But if this be so, it is a little difficult to understand references to the lessons to be drawn from the position of such countries as Bavaria.  For the difficulty of applying German precedents to proposed innovations in the English constitution lies far deeper than the unsuitability to England of the forms of German Imperialism.  The condition which has given birth to the present German Empire is that in Germany the sentiment of nationality has overridden the political divisions which broke up Germany into almost disconnected and often hostile States.  In Germany the popular passion for unity has compelled the formation of a United Empire.  This sentiment, and not the cumbersome device of an ill-arranged constitution, prevents Bavaria from using her independence in a manner inconsistent with the unity of the Empire.  The force which tends towards unity is constantly on the increase.  The Empire has the legal means of diminishing or indeed of destroying the independence of the States, and should the independence of a State ever come into conflict with the unity of the nation State rights will not, we may be sure, win the day.  Nor, further, is it any accident that Bismarck whilst tolerating the existence of Parliaments will not tolerate the introduction of Parliamentary government.  The acquiescence of Liberals in the evils of personal rule is due to the consciousness that the real authority of the Emperor is necessary for the unity of the Empire.  Contrast all this with the condition of things under which Englishmen are adjured to concede a Parliament to Ireland.  The leading features of the case, according at any rate to Home Rulers, are that Parliament is too weak to withstand the pressure exercised by eighty-six obstructives, and that Ireland, no less, as we are now at last frankly told, than Scotland and Wales, desires to relax the bonds of national unity.  We are advised to dissolve the United Kingdom into a confederacy because Germany, through a clumsy form of confederacy, is growing into a united empire.  This counsel confuses the stages of imperfect development with the stage of incipient decay; it ascribes to the childishness of approaching senility the hopes which are proper to the childishness of early youth.  The point is worth pressing.  The considerations which govern a confederacy as it is developing into a nation are very different from the considerations applicable to a full grown nation when threatened with dismemberment into a confederacy.