of the Federal system.

To the view of Federalism here maintained there exist one or two
objections, so obvious that without some reference to them my argument
would lack completeness.

Federalism, it is urged, has succeeded in Switzerland and in America; it
may, therefore, succeed in the United Kingdom.

If the general drift of my argument does not sufficiently answer this
objection, two special replies lie near at hand. In the case both of
Switzerland and of America, a Federal Constitution supplied the means by
which States, conscious of a common national feeling, have approached to
political unity. It were a rash inference from this fact, that when two
parts of one nation are found (as must be asserted by any Home Ruler)
not to be animated by a common feeling of nationality, a Federal
Constitution is the proper means by which to keep them in union. The
more natural deduction from the general history of Federalism is, that a
confederation is an imperfect political union, transitory in its nature,
and tending either to pass into one really united State, or to break up
into the different States which compose the Federation.

If, again, the example either of America or of Switzerland is to teach
us anything worth knowing, the history of those countries must be read
as a whole. It will then be seen that the two most successful
confederacies in the world have been kept together only by the decisive
triumph through force of arms of the central power over real or alleged
State rights. General Dufour in Switzerland, General Grant and General
Sherman in America, were the true interpreters and preservers of the
constitutional pact. This undoubted fact hardly suits the theories of
Irish Federalists.

Nor ought we to stop at this point. Citizens of the Union filled with
justifiable pride at the success of the American Constitution assume
that a Federal Government is in itself absolutely the best form of
government, that in any country where it can be adopted it must be an
improvement on the existing institutions of the land, and that as
compared with the constitutional monarchy of England federalism
exhibits no special faults from which English constitutionalism is free.
This assumption is perfectly natural; it resembles that absolute faith
in the virtues of the British Constitution which reached its culminating
point when Burke's intimate friend and pupil, Gilbert Elliott, himself
no mean statesman, went to Corsica to estab