t without a Home Rule Bill no
Land Bill worth consideration as a means of pacifying Ireland can be
passed.

The complete partisan spirit in which Home Rule has been treated is the
more to be deplored as the subject is one which does not lend itself
readily to the trivialities of party debates. It raises questions of
principle, not of detail. It ascends at once into the highest region of
politics. It is conversant with the great questions of constitutional
and international law, and leads to an inquiry into the very nature of
governments and the various modes in which communities of men are
associated together either as simple or composite nations. To describe
those modes in detail would be to give a history of the various
despotic, monarchical, oligarchical, and democratic systems of
government which have oppressed or made happy the children of men. Such
a description is calculated to perplex and mislead from its very extent;
not so an inquiry into the powers of government, and a classification of
those powers. They are limited in extent, and, if we confine ourselves
to English names and English necessities, we shall readily attain to an
apprehension of the mode in which empires, nations, and political
societies are bound together, at least in so far as such knowledge is
required for the understanding of the nature of Imperial supremacy, and
the mode in which Home Rule in Ireland is calculated to affect that
supremacy.

The powers of government are divisible into two great classes--1.
Imperial powers; 2. State powers, using "State" in the American sense of
a political community subordinated to some other power, and not in the
sense of an independent nation. The Imperial powers are in English law
described as the prerogatives of the Crown, and consist in the main of
the powers of making peace and war, of maintaining armies and fleets and
regulating commerce, and making treaties with foreign nations. State
powers are complete powers of local self-government, described in our
colonial Constitutions as powers to make laws "for the peace, order, and
good government of the Colony or State" in which such powers are to be
exercised.

Intermediate between the Imperial and State powers are a class of
powers required to prevent disputes and facilitate intercourse between
the various parts of an empire or other composite system of States--for
example, the coinage of money, and other regulations relating to the
currency; the law