to think, one of the most honoured among the women of America.  The Lyman Riots at Boston, as indeed every stage in the noble struggle of the American Abolitionists against popular injustice, tell the same tale, namely, that law in the United States has once and again failed to assert its due supremacy over injustice backed by public approval.  This melancholy failure may possibly support the proposition that England cannot enforce the law in Ireland.  It far more conclusively shows that even in countries deeply imbued with the spirit of legality self-government has no necessary tendency to produce just government or just legislation.

Let us, however, examine with care the lessons to be drawn from the treatment of the Southern States of America by the North.

The natural and most obvious moral of modern American history is that the majority of a nation have both the right and power to coerce a minority who claim to break up the unity of the State.  The most distinguished English Liberals, such as Bright and Mill, held, and as I conceive on sound grounds of reason and justice, that the Southern States were neither legally nor morally justified in their claim to secede from the Union; but no fair-minded man can deny that a plausible constitutional case could be made out in favour of Secession, nor that the citizens of the Southern confederacy demonstrated their wish and determination to secede by far more cogent evidence than the return of eighty-six Secessionists to Congress.  The prima facie arguments which may be alleged in favour of Secession were tenfold stronger—­unfounded as I hold them to have been—­than the prima facie arguments in favour of Ireland’s right to Home Rule.  Moreover, in studying the history of the United States, an Englishman is at the present moment more concerned with the results than with the justification of the suppression of the Southern rebellion.  The policy of the North attained its object:  the Union was restored, and its existence is now placed beyond the reach of peril.  The abolition of slavery took away the source of disagreement between the Northern and Southern States, and the tremendous exhibition of the power of the Republic has finally, it is supposed, destroyed the very idea of Secession.  There is certainly nothing in all this which discourages the attempt to maintain the political unity of Great Britain and Ireland.  We are told, however, to forget the force employed to suppress Secession, and to recollect only the policy of the Republicans after the close of the Civil War.  That policy was a failure as long as it involved the denial to the Southern States of their State autonomy, and became a success from the moment when it recognised to the full the sacredness of State rights.  This, or some statement like this, represents the mode in which the annals of the Union must be read if they are to be interpreted in favour of Home Rule.  The reading is a strained interpretation of events which are known to every one.