ch are proper to the childishness of
early youth. The point is worth pressing. The considerations which
govern a confederacy as it is developing into a nation are very
different from the considerations applicable to a full grown nation
when threatened with dismemberment into a confederacy.

Deak's statesmanship undoubtedly found at any rate a temporary solution
of the questions which kept Austria and Hungary at variance in a
compromise which bears some analogy to the arrangement by which Home
Rulers propose at once to loosen and to maintain the connection between
England and Ireland. In the case of Austria-Hungary, the union which
exists is not, on the face of it at least, a step towards unity, but
rather the surrender of the endeavour to mould the two parts of the
monarchy into a united empire. The Dual system is therefore the instance
of the blessings attending Home Rule which is most sedulously thrust
upon English attention. Let us see, then, what in outline this system
is, and what are the causes which favour its existence.[4]

German jurisprudence has taxed hard its boundless stores of ingenuity
and obscurity in the endeavour to find a proper scientific definition of
the nature of the anomalous union which binds together the monarchy of
Austria-Hungary. With the inquiry, however, what may be the precise
class of constitutions under which we ought to bring a political
arrangement which is "singular" in the strictest sense of that word,
English inquirers need not concern themselves. The broad outlines of
the Dual system, invented by the ingenuity of Deak, and accepted under
the stress of necessity by the sagacity of the Emperor, may, for our
present purpose, be roughly sketched in short, and it is hoped in not
unintelligible terms.

The Dual system is a permanent alliance rather than a union between the
kingdom of Hungary and the countries now represented in the Austrian
Imperial Parliament, or (to use convenient though not quite accurate
terms) between Austria and Hungary.

The essential features of this alliance or compromise, which is in its
nature a treaty far more than an act of legislation, may be thus summed
up.

At the head of the whole monarchy stands the Emperor-King. The rules for
the succession to the throne indeed secure that the Imperial and the
Hungarian Crown shall always devolve upon the same person. The Crowns,
however, are distinct, the monarch on whose head they rest governs two
distinctly d