treated as subsidiary is, in the eyes of any student of
constitutions, as ridiculous as it would seem to Mr. Gladstone for a
Chancellor of the Exchequer, on introducing his budget, to assert that,
whether he maintained or did not maintain the income tax, was an organic
detail which did not fundamentally affect his financial proposals. The
Ministry are as much at sea as their chief; nor is this wonderful. There
are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience.
The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a
constitution. But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign
of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are
engaged is the formation of a new constitution. Blind leaders are
leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more
for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland,
are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as
'trust in the people,' which pass muster for principles. If the blind
lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice?

The peril in which the country stands is concealed from us by a curious
reaction of opinion. Good political institutions, it was at one time
held, were the cause of a nation's happiness, and England, it was firmly
believed, owed her prosperity wholly to her constitution. A century of
revolutions has taught us all that a good form of government cannot of
itself save a state from ruin, and many of us have come to think that
forms of government are nothing, and that no constitutional changes can
impair the strength of England. No delusion however is more patent or
more noxious. Never was a country richer in the elements of strength
than were the Thirteen Colonies when their independence was acknowledged
by England. Yet the Confederation by the vices of its constitution
filled the colonies with discord, and made them both weak at home and
contemptible abroad, whilst the creation of the United States restored
them to peace and opened for them the road to greatness. The
predominance for more than fifty years of the Slave Power in the
politics of the American Union, the struggle measured by centuries
through which at last the Protestant and progressive Cantons of
Switzerland asserted their rightful supremacy over the Catholic and
unprogressive Cantons of Switzerland, the weakness of Prussia when, not
much more than forty[135] years back,