Seven years after these words were written, Mr. Gladstone, owing to the unexpected development of public opinion which brought the matter within the sphere of practical politics, carried the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Mr. Goldwin Smith would not admit the application I am about to make of his principle. But it may be given to Ireland to lead the way in introducing throughout the United Kingdom a rational distribution of legislative and administrative functions between local Parliaments for the two islands, or the three kingdoms, and an imperial Parliament dealing with the common interests of the United Kingdom.

Of one thing it is, I think, reasonable to feel assured. England and Scotland will not be parties to any system which places Ireland in a position inferior to themselves, nor would Ireland, though she might accept it for a moment, with a view not to completer or closer union, but to total separation, permanently acquiesce in it. The government of Ireland, in important relations, by a Parliament in which she was not represented would be an exercise of authority more dangerous to the ruling power than to the ruled. It would accustom men's minds in England and Scotland to ways of thinking and acting which might prove perilous to sound principles of government. The tyranny of the Athenian democracy over its subject islands undermined the democracy at home. Slaveholding is at least as dangerous to the slaveholder as to the slave. If equality between England, Scotland, and Ireland is to be maintained, it must be in one or other of three ways. There is the system established by the Act of Union, which gives England, Scotland, and Ireland each its fair share of representation in one Parliament, dealing alike with imperial and local concerns. This system has broken down. Parliament has proved unequal to the task of necessary legislation; the executive is overweighted; Ireland has been for eighty-five years in a state of open or secret rebellion. There is the federal system which prevails in every great Parliamentary nation, except Italy and France, and in those countries the centralised methods of government are constant sources of difficulty and danger. This probably will be the final solution. I do not say that the German Empire, the AustroHungarian Monarchy, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, and the United States furnish precedents which we can closely follow, or analogies which are strictly to the point. But singly and collectively they indicate a general scheme and method which capable statesmanship and popular goodwill such as Mr. Gladstone can call to his aid would be able to apply to the case of the United Kingdom.

The third method of securing equality between England and Ireland is by their complete separation for all legislative and administrative purposes-a separation which would probably carry with it not only the Parliamentary independence of Ireland, but ultimately severance from the Crown of England too.

In its present shape, Mr. Gladstone's Bill tends to this result. No country worthy of self-government would permanently or long consent to be debarred from dealing by its representatives with the momentous topics not merely of external and Imperial policy, but even of domestic legislation, which the Legislative Body of Ireland is formally prohibited from touching or even approaching. The list is divided into two classes, the first of which is described in the marginal summary as Exceptions from Powers of Irish Legislature;' the second as 'Restrictions on Powers of Irish Legislature.'

The exceptions from the powers of the Irish Legislature, as to which it is declared that any law made in contravention of this section shall be void,' are thirteen in number. They consist of subjects which would properly fall within the province of a Federal Parliament; and, if Ireland were a member of such a federation, and were fairly represented in its Parliament, there would be no objection to their being withheld from the competence of the Irish Legislature. But in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, as it at present stands, though in this respect he will, it may be hoped, find it practicable to modify it in the sense I have indicated, England and Scotland are to legislate for Ireland on these paramount questions:-The status and succession of the Crown; peace and war; the national defences; treaties with foreign powers; offences against the law of nations; treason, alienage, naturalisation; trade, navigation, and quarantine; external postal and telegraph services; beacons, lighthouses, and sea-marks; money, weights and measures, copyright and patents-any law passed by the Irish Legislative Body on any of these subjects is declared to be null and void. The representatives of Great Britain are to legislate for Ireland on these things, and the representatives of Ireland cannot, as Mr. Gladstone's Bill now stands, touch them with a finger.

The subjects on which the powers of the Legislative Body are restricted that is to say, on which it shall not make any law,' are the establishment or endowment of any form of religion, or the prohibition of its free exercise; the imposition of disabilities or privileges on account of religious belief; interference with denominational education or charities; the refusal of a conscience clause in schools; the rights and property of corporations (without the leave of her Majesty in Council); duties of customs and duties of excise; and the Government of Ireland Act itself. Irish members have declared that they will be content with a position similar to that of Canada. But the present Bill does not give them any such position. Most of the matters with which the Irish governing body is prohibited from dealing are expressly reserved in the British North America Act of 1867 to the Parliament of the Dominion. Ireland is put in a position corresponding not with that of Canada, but with that of Ontario. One of the viceroys of Ireland, who held office towards the close of the eighteenth century, expressed his view

of his official authority by a caricature which he drew of himself with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth open. The exceptions from, and the restrictions on, the powers of the Legislative Body of Ireland leave it in the position in which Lord Townshend depicted himself, its hands tied behind its back, and its mouth open. It may, perhaps, talk, but it cannot act.

These restrictions are certainly proposed, and they may possibly be accepted, in good faith. But though in Ireland an agitator, Mr. Parnell in Westminster is a tactician. Mr. Parnell has habitually said, when the settlement of Ireland has been in question, that he cannot guarantee permanent acquiescence in it. No man can guarantee circumstances, or the movement of public opinion and feeling. No honest man will even guarantee the future state of his own mind, or restrain his freedom of speech and action. It is as certain as anything future can be that, if Mr. Gladstone's Government of Ireland Bill becomes law in its present form, very few years will elapse before attempts are made to remove the exceptions from' and 'the restrictions on' the powers of the Irish Legislature. These efforts in the circumstances will be laudable and righteous. With the present development of Parliamentary government and the ideas which prevail as to the representative system, no nation worthy of itself will consent to be excluded from dealing with the topics which the Irish Legislative Body is allowed to approach only with its hands tied behind its back and its mouth open. Her representatives must have their equal share of authority in regard to them, if not in Westminster, then in Dublin. Irish Parliamentary life will be worth nothing, Ireland will be a parish and not a nation, if she is debarred from dealing with the matters which give their chief dignity to politics. If she is to handle them at Westminster, we must either maintain the Union as it is--which is now scarcely possible, and is not desirable or adopt the federal system, in which probably the true solution lies. If Ireland is to deal with these high matters in Dublin, she becomes independent of the Imperial Parliament. Irish Parliamentary independence, if it is real, will carry with it the dependence of the executive power on Parliament, that is to say, independent of the Crown, as advised by ministers dependent on the British Parliament and subject to British influences.

This part of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, not in the intention of its author, but in its logical consequences, the working out of which would no doubt be variously hindered, delayed, and concealed, favours complete separation. In 1887 we should begin again the struggle with the Irish Parliament which marks the history of our relations with that country, but which assumes new vigour, in 1753. In less than thirty years from that time Ireland had gained her point. It probably would not take her longer now. The struggle now would VOL. XIX. No. 111.

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be against the statutory limitation of the powers of the Irish Legislative Body.

Sometimes in good faith, as often probably by way of experiment, laws trespassing on the subjects excluded from the powers of the Legislative Body would be passed, and the constitutional questions involved would be referred, under the twenty-fifth clause of the Government of Ireland Bill, to the Judicial Committee of Privy Council, which is erected into a kind of Supreme Court as between Ireland and England, in analogy with its functions as regards our colonies and India. On other occasions the instrumentalities provided for the amendment of the organic statute would be put into force. By these means a constant agitation, involving frequent conflict between the Irish Government and the Imperial Power, would go on. By subtle and gradual usurpations involving at last a practice, by explanatory and enlarging laws, by amendments of the organic statute, it is likely that the Legislative Body of Ireland would gradually acquire the powers now withheld from it.

An analogous, though, owing to the difference of circumstances, a not precisely similar course, marked the history of the Irish Parliament. It always maintained in theory, and often attempted to vindicate, the independence of which Grattan at length obtained the recognition from the British Parliament. An English statute of Richard the Third's reign asserts in bad Latin a principle constitutionally sounder than that on which Mr. Gladstone's Bill is based: Hibernia habet Parliamenta, et faciunt leges, et nostra statuta non ligant eos, quia non mittunt milites ad Parliamentum.' Poynings's Act, which, as Mr. Gladstone stated in the House, was passed by the Irish Parliament, and was therefore a self-surrender of powers, is only ten years later in date than the statute of Richard the Third just quoted. Its provision that the statutes lately made in England be deemed good and effective in Ireland, was simply an adoption of previous legislation. It did not therefore apply, according to the Irish contention, to English Acts subsequent to it.

The celebrated work of Molyneux, published in 1697, The Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament in England stated, is the classic vindication of the principle which Grattan triumphantly asserted a century later. The English Parliament replied by censuring the book and having it burned. The right of the Irish Parliament to originate money bills and to maintain them in their original form in spite of amendments by the English Privy Council was asserted and denied, and compromised, in the true constitutional fashion, by expedients which did not involve concession of the point in dispute on either side. The right of the British House of Lords to decide Irish cases, which forms a part of Mr. Gladstone's Bill, was contested in Ireland.

In 1753 the renewed struggle of the Irish Parliament against its

control by England was begun by the claim of the Irish House of Commons to dispose, of its own authority and without the consent of the King, of certain surplus revenues. The pretension was not of course admitted in England, and the Irish Parliament provided against the dispute arising in future by appropriations calculated to leave no bone of contention in any subsequent surplus. These are a few illustrations of incessant and ultimately successful struggles against limitations such as Mr. Gladstone's Bill imposes, and which are likely, in a short time, to lead to corresponding conflicts with an identical result.

The best way out of these difficulties lies not in the removal of the restrictions upon the Irish Legislative Body, which would be complete separation, but in the admission of Irish peers and commoners to the Imperial Parliament to which these matters properly belong. This cannot be done, as I have endeavoured to show, by leaving it the Parliament of England and Scotland, as well as of the United Kingdom. In such a Parliament the line cannot be drawn so as to prevent Irish measures from interfering, indirectly perhaps but effectively, with English and Scotch business.

Separate Parliaments for Great Britain and Ireland, or for England, Scotland, and Ireland, subordinate to an Imperial Parliament, representing fairly the two or the three countries, is the only logical and practical solution of the difficulty. A step must be taken in this direction, or things must remain as they are. But to leave things as they are is to fall back upon a system of coercion which is likely to issue in civil war and the suppression of all constitutional liberties in Ireland.

Nor would our difficulty be in Ireland alone. The Irish, like the Jews and the Greeks, are now a dispersed race, and carry their sense of nationality and their hatred to England into every country in which they dwell, and they will find points and instruments of attack wherever they may be. To say this, to point to the danger of outrage and violence on a scale greater than any we have known, is not to address an argument to cowardice. It is simply to appeal to prudence and common sense. The cowardice lies in shutting the eyes to dangerous probabilities, so probable as to be practically certainties While the passing of Mr. Gladstone's Bill in its present shape is inexpedient and indeed impossible, the delay of legislation would be full of peril. The transformation of the measure in the main after the manner which I have ventured to suggest, and its speedy enactment thus modified, is the course which a prudent statesmanship will follow.

I have not thought it desirable to speak of the details of the Bill. They exhibit Mr. Gladstone's unique power of political contrivance and construction. The constitution of the Irish Legislative Body, its division into two orders, the veto by the first order, the