attack.  The revolution which works these changes holds out no hope of reconciliation with Ireland.  An attempt, in short, to impose on England and Scotland a constitution which they do not want, and which is quite unsuited to the historical traditions and to the genius of Great Britain, offers to Ireland a constitution which Ireland is certain to dislike, which has none of the real or imaginary charms of independence, and ensures none of the solid benefits to be hoped for from a genuine union with England.

If this be the true state of the case, thus much at least is argumentatively made out:  Federalism offers to England not a constitutional compromise, but a fundamental revolution, and this revolution, however moderate in its form or in the intention of its advocates, does not offer that reasonable chance of reconciliation with the mass of the Irish people which might be a compensation for a repeal of the Union, and is as much opposed to the interests of Great Britain as would be the national independence of Ireland.  This conclusion is a purely negative one, but it is, as far as English statesmen are concerned, the reductio ad impossibile of the case in favour of Home Rule in so far as Home Rule takes the form of Federalism.

* * * * *

II. Home Rule as Colonial Independence.—­The modern Colonial policy of England has, or is thought to have, achieved two results which impress popular imagination:—­it has relieved English statesmanship from an unbearable burden of worry and anxiety; it has (as most people believe) changed Colonial unfriendliness or discontent into enthusiastic or ostentatious loyalty.  Some politicians, therefore, who are anxious to terminate the secular feud between England and Ireland, and to free Parliament from the presence, and therefore from the obstructiveness, of the Home Rulers, readily assume that the formula of “Colonial independence” contains the solution of the problem how to satisfy at once the demand of Ireland for independence and the resolution of Great Britain to maintain the integrity of the Empire.  This assumption rests on no sure foundation, but derives such plausibility as it possesses from the gross ignorance of the public as to the principles and habits which govern the English State system.  A mere account of the constitutional relations existing between England and a self-governed colony is almost equivalent to a suggestion of the reasons which forbid the hope that the true answer to the agitation for Home Rule is to be found in conceding to Ireland institutions like those which satisfy the inhabitants of New South Wales or Victoria.  To render such a statement at once brief and intelligible is no easy matter, for, among all the political arrangements devised by the ingenuity of statesmen, none can be found more singular, more complicated, or more anomalous than the position of combined independence and subordination occupied by the large number of self-governing colonies which