rights of the Federation and the individual States.  From the history and from the immobility of the constitution, we may perceive the extent to which the existence of a Federal pact checks change, or, in other words, reform.  Every institution which can lay claim to be based upon an organic law acquires a sort of sacredness.  Under a system of Federalism, the Crown, the House of Peers, the Imperial Parliament itself, when transformed into a Federal Assembly, would be almost beyond the reach of change, reform, or abolition.  Nor is it the Legislature of Great Britain alone which would suffer a fundamental change.  The relations between the Executive and the country would undergo immense modification.  The authority of the Crown might be enhanced by the establishment of a Federal Union.  The King would become, in a very special sense, the representative of national or Imperial unity, and the weakening of Parliament might lead to the strengthening of the monarch.  However this might be, it has, it is submitted, been now shown that Federalism would dislocate every English constitutional arrangement.

Secondly.—­The changes necessitated by Federalism would all tend to weaken the power of Great Britain.  That this is so has been already to a great degree established, in considering the mode in which Federalism destroys the sovereignty of Parliament.  But a system of Federalism would assuredly weaken the Government quite as much as the Legislature.  The Executive, as the organ of the Federal Union, would be hampered by new conditions utterly unknown to an English Ministry.  The language of Federalists exhibits a curious and ominous silence or ambiguity as to the disposal of the armed forces.  Is the army to be a British army, with authority at the will of the Federal Government to enter every part of the new Union, or is Ireland to have an independent force of her own?  This, again—­and every specific criticism is open to the same retort—­may be called a detail, but it is a detail which touches the root of the whole matter.  If the Federal, that is in effect the English, Government is to retain the same control over the whole army as at present—­if Ireland is not to have a local force under the control of local authorities—­then the language as to Irish independence used by Irish Nationalists is singularly misleading.  If, on the other hand, order is to be maintained, or not maintained, by a native army under the guidance of Irish commanders, then it passes the wit of man to see by what means the rights of the central government are to be enforced in any case of disagreement between the Imperial and the Irish Parliament.  With the memory of the Irish volunteers before his mind, an historian, such, for example, as Mr. McCarthy, will hardly assert that the difficulty raised is one of which he cannot conceive the existence.  For my part, I heartily join in the admiration he, no doubt, feels for the patriots of 1782, but no man in his senses will maintain that