very step. As soon as you give up the
attempt to rule men by drumhead justice, you have to begin to trust in
some degree to their intelligence, to their love of order, to their
self-respect, and to their desire for material prosperity, and the
nearer you get to what is called free government the larger this trust
has to be. It has to be very large indeed in order to carry on such a
government as that of Great Britain or of the United States; it has to
be larger still in order to set up and administer a federal government.
In such a government the worst that can happen is very patent. The
opportunities which the best-drawn federal constitution offers for
outbreaks of what Americans call "pure cussedness"--that is, for the
indulgence of anarchical tendencies and impulses--is greater than in any
other. Therefore, to set it up, or even to discuss it with any profit,
your faith in the particular variety of human nature, which is to live
under it, has to be great. No communities can live under it together
and make it work which do not respect each other. I say respect, I do
not say love, each other. The machine can be made to go a good while
without love, and if it goes well it will bring love before long; but
mutual respect is necessary from the first day. This is why Mr. Dicey's
book is discouraging. The arguments which he addressed to Englishmen
would not, I think, be formidable but for the mood in which he finds
Englishmen, and that this mood makes against Home Rule there can be
little doubt.

I am often asked by Americans why the English do not call an Anglo-Irish
convention in the American fashion, and discuss the Irish question with
the Irish, find out exactly what they will take to be quiet, and settle
with them in a rational way. I generally answer that, in the first
place, a convention is a constitution-making agency with which the
English public is totally unfamiliar, and that, in the second place,
Englishmen's temper is too imperial, or rather imperious, to make the
idea of discussion on equal terms with the Irish at all acceptable. They
are, in fact, so far from any such arrangement that--preposterous and
even funny as it seems to the American mind--to say that an English
statesman is carrying on any sort of communication with the
representatives of the Irish people is to bring against him, in English
eyes, a very damaging accusation. When a man like Mr. Matthew Arnold
writes to the _Times_ to contend that Englis