eland, the constitution which satisfies the Victorians
would not satisfy the Irish, and for a good reason: the form would be
the same, but the effect would be different. A suffering and
discontented people will not accept words for facts.

One condition indeed, which more perhaps than any other ensures the
success of our Colonial system, Great Britain has in the case of Ireland
the power to reproduce. Immunity from Imperial taxation is one source of
Colonial loyalty to the Empire. If Ireland is to accept or to receive
the mixed independence and subordination of a colony, she ought to enjoy
the substantial advantage of a theoretically inferior position. The
Colonial system, as I have already insisted, involves the renunciation
of Imperial taxation.

[Sidenote: 3. Home Rule as Constitution of 1782.]

Home Rule as the revival of Grattan's Constitution is an impossibility.
The Constitution of 1782 belongs to a past age, and cannot by any
miracle of political art be at the present day restored to life.

[Sidenote: 4. Home Rule as Gladstonian Constitution.]

Home Rule under the Gladstonian Constitution means an artificial
combination of Federalism and Colonialism. Its aim is to secure the
advantages of two opposite systems; its result is to combine and
intensify the disadvantages of both systems. It inevitably tends towards
the dissolution of the United Kingdom into a Federation; it immediately
disturbs the bases of the Constitution by creating the artificial bond
of something like a Federal legislature between England and Ireland; it
introduces into the relations between each of the different divisions of
the United Kingdom elements of conflict which are all but inherent in
Federalism; it requires that absolute deference for the judicial
decisions of a Federal Court which if it exist anywhere can exist only
among a people like the Americans, imbued with legal notions, and as it
were born with innate respect for law. That this sentiment cannot exist
in Ireland is certain; whether it exist in the required intensity even
in England is problematical. The Gladstonian Constitution, again,
because it contains some institutions borrowed from the Colonial system
without the conditions requisite for their proper working so to speak
falsifies them. The Imperial supremacy of Great Britain, the Imperial
control over the army, the occasional interference with the Irish
executive and the veto of the Crown on Irish legislation, are each