Act of Parliament.  The allegation is true, but it really tells greatly in favour of an ultimate reference to the people of any Home Rule Bill passed in a Parliament.  If such a Bill becomes law, it ought to be a law not admitting of easy repeal.  No doubt reaction may be justifiable, but reaction is a great evil, and the Referendum puts a check as well on reaction as on hasty innovation.  In any case the time has arrived when Unionist statesmen should consider the expediency of announcing that no Home Rule Bill will finally be accepted until it has undergone a reference to and received the approval of the electors.  On no better issue could battle be joined with revolutionists than on the question whether the people of the United Kingdom should or should not be allowed to express their will.  Unionists have every reason to feel confidence in their cause; their only policy, their one path of safety is to make it, as they can do, absolutely plain that they rely upon justice, and that they appeal from parties to the nation.

We have now before us the essential features of the new constitution framed by Gladstonians for the whole United Kingdom.  We know its inherent defects and inconsistencies; we have considered what may be said on its behalf, or rather of the policy of which it is the outcome.  The proposed change in our form of government touches the very foundations of the State, and deeply, though indirectly, threatens the unity of the whole Empire.  Never surely since the day when the National Assembly of France drew up that Constitution of 1791, which built to be eternal endured for not quite a year, has an ancient nation been so strangely invited to accept an untried and unknown polity.

The position indeed of the French constitution-makers was in some respects stronger and more defensible than the position of our English innovators.  The members of the National Assembly knew precisely what they were doing.  They meant to alter the fundamental institutions of France.  A change moreover in the whole scheme of French government was an admitted necessity.  France might be uncertain as to the working of the new constitution, but France was absolutely certain that the ancien regime was detestable.  Individuals or nations may wisely risk much when they are escaping from a social condition which they detest, they may know that an innovation is in itself of doubtful expediency, yet may consider any alleged reform worth a trial when no change can be a change for the worse.  In the France of 1791 confidence in the future meant abhorrence of the past.

The authors of our new constitution can hardly be called the designers of their own handiwork; they have been the sport of accident.  Their intention, or rather the intention of their leader, was in 1886 merely to grant some sort of Parliamentary independence to Ireland.  The resolution to concede Home Rule was sudden; it may have been taken up without due weighing of its consequences.  It has assuredly