But the matter must be pressed further.  Even were it possible to place Ireland in the position either of an American State or Swiss Canton, or of an independent colony, the arrangement would not meet the needs of the United Kingdom.  This is a point which has not as yet arrested attention.  For the safety of the United Kingdom it is absolutely necessary that the authority of the Imperial Government, or, in other words, the law of the land, should be enforced in Ireland in a sense in which the law of the land is rarely enforced in federations, and in which it is certainly not enforced by the Imperial Government in self-governing colonies.

In federations the law of the land is nearly powerless when opposed to the will of a particular State.  President Jackson’s reported dictum, ’John Marshall[118] has delivered his judgment, let him now enforce it if he can,’ and the fact that the judgment was never enforced,[119] are things not to be forgotten.  They are worth a thousand disquisitions on the admirable working of federalism.  But there is no need to rely on a traditional story, which, however, is an embodiment of an undoubted transaction.  The plainest facts of American history all tell the same tale.  No Abolitionist could in 1850 without peril to his life have preached abolition in South Carolina; difficult indeed was the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and small the practical respect paid in Massachusetts to the doctrine of the Dred Scott Case.  Unless all reports are false, the Negro vote throughout the Southern States is at this moment practically falsified, and little do the Constitutional Amendments benefit a Negro in any case where his conduct offends Southern principle or prejudice.  For my present argument it matters nothing whether the oppression of individuals or the defiance of law was or was not, in all these cases, as it certainly was in some instances, a violation to the supreme law of the land.  If the law was violated then, why should we expect Imperial law to be of more force in Ireland than federal law in South Carolina, or in Massachusetts?  If the rights of individuals were not adequately protected by federal law against the injustice of a particular State, then why expect that the provisions of our new constitution, far less stringent as they are than the protective provisions of the United States Constitution, should avail to protect unpopular persons in Ireland against the legal tyranny of the Irish Executive or the Irish Parliament?

Experience of federalism is not confined to the United States.  The Swiss Confederation is in Europe the most successful both of democratic and of federal polities.  The Swiss Executive exercises powers common to all continental governments but of a description which no English Cabinet could claim, and the Swiss Executive is made up of statesmen skilful beyond measure in what may be called the diplomacy of federalism.  Yet in Switzerland, as in the United States, federal