d concerning the mode in which
it ought to be constituted."

Mr. Madison's challenge to the opponents of the American Constitution to
agree on some plan of their own, and his humorous suggestion that if the
American people had to wait for some such agreement to be reached they
would go for a long time without a government, are curiously applicable
to the opponents of Irish Home Rule. They are very fertile in reasons
for thinking that neither the Gladstone plan nor any other plan can
succeed, but no two of them, so far as I know, have yet hit upon any
other mode of pacifying Ireland, except the use of force for a certain
period to maintain order, and oddly enough, even when they agree on this
remedy, they are apt to disagree about the length of time during which
it should be tried.

Mr. Dicey, in conceding the success of the American Constitution, seems
to me unmindful, if I may use the expression, of the judgments he would
probably have passed on it had it been submitted to him at the outset
were he in the frame of mind to which a prolonged study of the Irish
problem has now brought him. The Supreme Court, for instance, which he
now recognizes as an essential feature of the Federal Constitution, and
the absence of which in the Gladstonian arrangement he treats as a fatal
defect, would have undoubtedly appeared to him a preposterous
contrivance. It would have seemed to him impossible that a legislature
like Congress, with the traditions of parliamentary omnipotence still
strong in the minds of the members, would ever submit to have its acts
nullified by a board composed of half a dozen elderly lawyers. Nor would
he have treated as any more reasonable the expectation that the State
tribunals, which had existed in each colony from its foundation, and had
earned the respect and confidence of the people, would quietly submit to
have their jurisdiction curtailed, their decisions overruled, causes
torn from their calendar, and prisoners taken out of their custody by
new courts of semi-foreign origin, which the State neither paid nor
controlled. He would, too, very probably have been most incredulous
about the prospect of the growth of loyalty on the part of New-Yorkers
and Massachusetts men to a new-fangled government, which was to make
itself only slightly felt in their daily lives, and was to sit a
fortnight away in an improvised village in the midst of a Virginian
forest.

He would, too, have ridiculed the notion that St