ized republic. The reason why I
have to rely on the United States for protection against some things and
not against others is that it was so stipulated when the State of New
York entered the Union. There is nothing in the nature of the federal
system to prevent the United States Government from protecting my
freedom of speech. Nor is there anything in the federal system which
forbids its protecting me against the establishment of a State Church,
which, as a matter of fact, it does not do. Nor is there anything in the
federal system compelling the Government to protect me against the
establishment of an order of nobility, which, as a matter of fact, it
does do. The reason why it does not do one of these things and does the
other is simply and solely that it was so stipulated, after much
discussion, in the contract. Most thinking men are to-day of opinion
that the United States ought to have exclusive jurisdiction of marriage,
so that the law of marriage might be uniform in all parts of the Union.
The reason why they do not possess such jurisdiction is not that
Congress is not fully competent to pass such a law or the federal courts
to execute it, but that no such jurisdiction is conferred by the
Constitution. In fact it seems to me just as reasonable to cite the ease
of divorce in various States of the Union as a defect in the federal
system, as to cite the oppression of local minorities in matters not
placed under federal authority by the organic law.

If one may judge from a great deal of writing on American matters which
one sees in English journals and the demands for federal interference in
America in State affairs which they constantly make, the greatest
difficulty Irish Home Rule has to contend with is the difficulty which
men bred in a united monarchy and under an omnipotent Parliament
experience in grasping what I may call the federal idea. The influence
of association on their minds is so strong that they can hardly conceive
of a central power, worthy of the name of a government, standing by and
witnessing disorders or failures of justice in any place within its
borders, without stepping in to set matters right, no matter what the
Constitution may say. They remind me often of an old verger in
Westminster Abbey during the American civil war who told me that "he
always knew a government without a head couldn't last." Permanence and
peace were in his mind inseparably linked with kingship. That even Mr.
Dicey has