but it is not a well-digested constitution.  It is inferior to the Home Rule Bill of 1886.  Another consequence of the circumstances under which the Bill has been framed is that its authors themselves have never had the benefit to be derived from the mature discussion of its principles.  Mr. Gladstone himself cannot say what are and what are not the fundamental ideas of his scheme.  He obviously held, at any rate when the Bill was introduced, that the presence of the Irish members at Westminster was a detail, whereas it is in reality the fact which governs the character of the new constitution.  To imply that such a matter can be treated as subsidiary is, in the eyes of any student of constitutions, as ridiculous as it would seem to Mr. Gladstone for a Chancellor of the Exchequer, on introducing his budget, to assert that, whether he maintained or did not maintain the income tax, was an organic detail which did not fundamentally affect his financial proposals.  The Ministry are as much at sea as their chief; nor is this wonderful.  There are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience.  The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a constitution.  But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are engaged is the formation of a new constitution.  Blind leaders are leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland, are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as ‘trust in the people,’ which pass muster for principles.  If the blind lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice?

The peril in which the country stands is concealed from us by a curious reaction of opinion.  Good political institutions, it was at one time held, were the cause of a nation’s happiness, and England, it was firmly believed, owed her prosperity wholly to her constitution.  A century of revolutions has taught us all that a good form of government cannot of itself save a state from ruin, and many of us have come to think that forms of government are nothing, and that no constitutional changes can impair the strength of England.  No delusion however is more patent or more noxious.  Never was a country richer in the elements of strength than were the Thirteen Colonies when their independence was acknowledged by England.  Yet the Confederation by the vices of its constitution filled the colonies with discord, and made them both weak at home and contemptible abroad, whilst the creation of the United States restored them to peace and opened for them the road to greatness.  The predominance for more than fifty years of the Slave Power in the politics of the American Union, the struggle measured by centuries through which at last the Protestant and progressive Cantons of Switzerland asserted their rightful supremacy over the Catholic