It is well indeed, judging from the lessons of history, if they do not produce bitter conflicts, or even civil war.  Let us take, however, the most sanguine view possible.  Let us grant that both in England and in Ireland every minister, every legislator, every judge, is inspired with a spirit of perfect disinterestedness and absolute fairness.  This concession, immense though it be, does not exclude vital differences of opinion.  In our new confederacy, as in every other, there will arise the contest between State rights and federal rights, between the authority of the Central Government and of the State Government.  In any case, a whole class of new difficulties and questions of a totally new description will make their appearance in the field of English politics, and call for the exercise on the part both of English and of Irish statesmen of extraordinary wisdom and extraordinary self-control.  The new constitution in short, in virtue of its federal tendencies, will revolutionise the public life of the United Kingdom.

From whatever side the matter be considered we arrive at the same result.  The Home Rule Bill is a new constitution; it subverts the bases of the English constitution as we now know it, for it destroys throughout Ireland the effective authority of the Imperial Parliament, and turns the United Kingdom into a federal government of a new and untried form.

The change may be necessary or needless, wise or unwise.  The first and most pressing necessity of the moment is that every elector throughout the United Kingdom should, realise the immense import of the innovation.  It is a revolution far more searching than would be the abolition of the House of Lords or the transformation of our constitutional monarchy into a presidential republic.

The next point to which the attention of every man throughout the land should be directed is, that the new constitution offered to us for acceptance is unknown to any other civilised country.  Parts of it are borrowed from the United States; some of its provisions are imported from the British colonies, whilst others are apparently the inventions of the unknown and irresponsible Abbe Sieyes, who is the ingenious constitution-maker of the Cabinet.  But the new polity as a whole resembles in its essence neither the American Commonwealth nor the Canadian Dominion, nor the Government either of New Zealand or of any other self-governing colony.  It is an attempt—­its admirers may think an original and ingenious attempt—­to combine the sovereignty of an Imperial Parliament with the elaborate limitation and distribution of powers which distinguish federal government.  The whole thing is an experiment and an experiment without precedent.  Its novelty is not its necessary condemnation, but neither on the other hand is innovation of necessity the same thing as reform.  The institutions of an ancient realm are not exactly the corpus vile on which theorists hard pressed by the practical difficulties