e
whole subject. There are probably not a dozen of them who would venture
to express their disapproval publicly. The mass of the population,
particularly in the West, sympathize, though half laughingly, with the
efforts of the transplanted Irish to "twist the British lion's tail,"
and all the politicians either sympathize with them, or pretend to do
so. I am not now expressing any opinion as to whether this state of
things is good or bad. What I wish to point out is that this
Irish-American influence on Irish affairs is very powerful, and may, for
all practical purposes, be considered permanent, and must be taken into
account as a constant element in the Irish problem. I will indeed
venture on the assertion that it is the appearance of the
Irish-Americans on the scene which has given the Irish question its
present seriousness. The attempts of the Irish at physical resistance to
English authority have been steadily diminishing in gravity during the
present century--witness the descent from the rebellion of 1798 to Smith
O'Brien's rebellion and the Fenian rising of 1867. On the other hand the
power of the Irish to act as a disturbing agency in English politics has
greatly increased, and the reason is that the stream of Irish discontent
is fed by thousands of rills from the United States. Every emigrant's
letter, every Irish-American newspaper, every returned emigrant with
money in his pocket and a good coat on his back, helps to swell it, and
there is not the slightest sign, that I can see, of its drying up.

Where Mr. Dicey is most formidable to the Home Rulers, as it seems to
me, is in his chapter on "Home Rule as Federalism," which is the form in
which the Irish ask for it. He attacks this in two ways. One is by
maintaining that the necessary conditions for a federal union between
Great Britain and Ireland do not exist. This disposes at one blow of all
the experience derived from the working of the foreign federations, on
which the advocates of Home Rule have relied a good deal. The other is
what I may call predictions that the federation even if set up would not
work. Either the state of facts on which all other federations have been
built does not exist in Ireland, or if it now exists, will not, owing to
the peculiarities of Irish character, continue to exist. In other words,
the federation will either fail at the outset, or fail in the long run.
No one can admire more than I do the force and ingenuity and wealth of