and sixty Irish members who sat alternately at Westminster and at Dublin to transact or perplex or obstruct the affairs common to the whole Empire.  To imagine such an arrangement, to sketch out in one’s fancy, for example, how the common budget decreed by the Delegations would be provided for by taxation imposed by the Irish Parliament, is enough to show that the Dual system is absolutely inapplicable to our circumstances.  It could not last for a year, and if by any miracle it did last for that time, the whole British Empire would be reduced to confusion or ruin.  The advocates of innovation exhibit the most singular mixture of despair and hopefulness.  The presence in Parliament of eighty-six Parnellites makes them despair of the British constitution, which has existed for centuries.  They hope or expect that three Parliaments, in two of which these very Parnellites, or men like them, would reappear, would harmoniously legislate for England, Ireland, and the British Empire, and this hope is based on the alleged success of that Dual system which has not without difficulty been kept going for not quite twenty years.  The alliance of scepticism and credulity, of which we have often heard in the sphere of theology, is a startling phenomenon in the province of politics.  The Dual system, however, it will be urged by its admirers, has worked well.  Admit the fact, the success is clearly due to circumstances negative and positive totally absent in the case of England and Ireland.  The bodies united by means of the compromise do not, like the United Kingdom, constitute the centre of a world-wide Empire.  Hungary has taken up arms against the Austrian Emperor, yet there has never been in strictness a feud between the Hungarians and the other subjects of the Emperor.  The compromise or alliance manifestly met the interest of both portions of the monarchy:  it restored to Hungary a constitution which for eighteen years or more had been suppressed, but which had never been given up; it secured, or went far to secure, the new constitutional liberties of the Austrian Empire.  Hungary could not stand alone, and she knew it.  The compromise was in reality a politic alliance between the two leading races among the many races governed by Francis Joseph.  The Germans and the Magyars came to terms; the alliance strengthened them each against other foes.  But with every political advantage the Dual system, of which the permanence is not as yet at all secure, might have proved as undurable as Grattan’s Constitution of 1782 but for one circumstance, to which I have already directed attention.  At the head of Austria-Hungary stands not an absolute, but a powerful monarch.  The authority of the Emperor is the spring which makes the cumbersome machinery of a complicated constitution keep going.  The matter is worth attention The power of the Emperor William holds together the States of the German Empire; the power of Francis Joseph keeps alive the Dual system; where the Crown has a real authority trial may be made of experiments in the way of local independence, which are impossible in a State where, as in England, the true sovereign is an elective assembly.