of public functions, whether of voting or of legislating, tended of itself to secure their proper exercise.  We know that power does not purify men in despotic governments, but we talk as if it did so in free governments.  Every one would of course admit, if the point were put flatly to him, that power alone is not enough, but that there must be added to power, in the case of the voter, a direct interest in the choice of good men, in the case of the legislator, responsibility to the voters, in the case of both, a measure of enlightenment and honour.  What the legislatures of the worst States show is not merely the need for the existence of a sound public opinion, for such a public opinion exists, but the need for methods by which it can be brought into efficient action upon representatives who, if they are left to themselves, and are not individually persons with a sense of honour and a character to lose, will be at least as bad in public life as they could be in private.  The greatness of the scale on which they act, and of the material interests they control, will do little to inspire them.  New York and Pennsylvania are by far the largest and wealthiest States in the Union.  Their legislatures are confessedly the worst.’[131]

The passage is the more impressive just because it is not written with a view to Ireland.  No one doubts that the people of the United States, both in morality and in talent, equal if they do not excel the people of any other country in the world.  But the warmest eulogist of America seeks throughout his work for the explanation of the fact which is really past dispute, that the political morality of the United States sinks below the general morality of the nation.[132] There is not the least reason why under a vicious constitution the government at Dublin should not reflect or exaggerate the vices, rather than represent the noble qualities and the gifts, of the Irish people.

But the doctrine of trust takes another and more general form.  You may place confidence, it is alleged, in the goodness of human nature, and should believe that the concession of Home Rule, just because it meets the wishes of the Irish people, will take away every source of discontent, and thereby remove any difficulty in making even an imperfect constitution work well.

To this the answer may fairly be made, which I have made in the preceding pages, that Home Rule does not meet the wish of the most important part of the Irish people, but in truth arouses their abhorrence, and that even Home Rulers care much less than Gladstonians suppose about constitutional changes.  To give a man a vote for a Parliament at Dublin when he is demanding an acre or two of land, comes very near giving him a stone when he asks for bread.  But I assume for a moment that the Irishmen, who express no great enthusiasm for the Home Rule Bill, desire the new constitution as ardently as sixty years or so ago our fathers desired parliamentary reform.