Nor ought we to stop at this point.  Citizens of the Union filled with justifiable pride at the success of the American Constitution assume that a Federal Government is in itself absolutely the best form of government, that in any country where it can be adopted it must be an improvement on the existing institutions of the land, and that as compared with the constitutional monarchy of England federalism exhibits no special faults from which English constitutionalism is free.  This assumption is perfectly natural; it resembles that absolute faith in the virtues of the British Constitution which reached its culminating point when Burke’s intimate friend and pupil, Gilbert Elliott, himself no mean statesman, went to Corsica to establish a miniature copy of English Parliamentary institutions.  But in each case a faith which is natural will also be pronounced by any candid judge to be unfounded.  Federalism has in its very essence, and even as it exists in America, at least two special faults.  It distracts the allegiance of citizens, and what is even more to the present point, it does not provide sufficient protection for the legal rights of unpopular minorities.  There is not, and never was, a word in the Articles of the Constitution forbidding American citizens to criticise the institutions of the State.  An American Abolitionist had as much right to denounce slavery at Boston, or for that matter at Charlestown, as an English Abolitionist had to denounce slavery in London or Liverpool.  It were ridiculous to maintain that the right was one which either Lloyd Garrison or his disciples were able to exercise.  Mr. Godkin[40] has repeated with perfect fairness the tale of the persecutions suffered by Prudence Crandall in Connecticut because she chose in exercise of her legal and moral rights to educate young women of colour.  Mr. Godkin apparently draws, as I have already pointed out, from the fact an inference—­which I confess myself not well able to follow—­against all attempts to enforce an unpopular law.  The more natural conclusion is that the Federal Government was not able to protect the rights of individuals against strong local sentiment.  This moral at any rate has an obvious application to any scheme of Federalism for Ireland.

The experience of Canada, again, is adduced to prove that a Federal constitution is compatible with loyalty to the British Crown.  Why should an arrangement which produces peace, prosperity, and loyalty across the Atlantic not be applied to Ireland?

The answer is, that the case of Canada is as regards Federalism irrelevant.  Canada is not part of a British Federation.  The Dominion as a whole is simply a colony, standing essentially in the same relation to England as Victoria or New South Wales.  The laws of the Parliament that meets at Ottawa need the Royal sanction, or, in other words, may be vetoed, or rather not approved, by the English Ministry of the day.  The Act itself on which the existence