Parliament
should impeach the Irish Viceroy, we suppose Mr. Gladstone would tell us
that the difficulty was not with England but with Queen Victoria.

Nor was Mr. Gladstone much happier in his allusion to Hungarian
Nationality in recent times. For more than 150 years Austria endeavoured
to extinguish the national life of Hungary. In 1867 this policy was
definitely abandoned, and Hungary was called to a share in the Empire of
the Hapsburgs. As recently as last October Mr. Parnell, when insisting
that Ireland must have an independent Parliament, said: 'We can point
to the example of other countries--to Austria and to Hungary--to the
fact that Hungary, having been conceded self-government, became one of
the strongest factors in the Austrian Empire.' The favour, with which
these references have been received by the Liberal party, is a singular
example how far afield they are ready to go in search of an argument.
Austria, in 1867, was a great military despotism, tottering to its fall
amidst a group of eager rivals. A general appeal to the nation, such as
France made at the commencement of the Revolutionary war, was out of the
question. Differences of race, differences of language, differences of
social condition, made national unity impossible within the wide
dominions of the House of Austria. The government at Vienna consented to
the division of its territories into groups of nearly equal strength. In
each of these groups various alien nationalities were clustered round a
central power more advanced in politics, in civilization, and in wealth,
than the adjacent territories. Instead of trying to weld their multiple
varieties of race into one great popular community, Austria, smitten at
Sadowa, shared her dominion with Hungary, and asked her to take charge
of the Government of the East Leithan Slavs, whilst the German
population of Austria dealt with the Czechs and Moravians and
Carinthians on the western side of the river.

Sir Henry Elliott has well pointed out, that what success the experiment
has had is in no small degree due to the large powers still enjoyed by
the Crown, and to the personal character and influence of the Emperor
Francis, the connecting link between the two dominions; but apart from
this actual result, the feasibility of the dual scheme depended on the
following considerations. In the first place, there was no alternative
in the condition in which the House of Austria found itself in 1867,
defeated in