an older philosopher than Butler has warned us that to demand demonstrative proof in the sphere of contingent matter is the same kind of absurdity as to demand probable reasoning in mathematics.  You cannot confute a prophet before the event; you can only disbelieve him.  The advocates of Home Rule believe that their policy would in general have an exactly contrary effect to that predicted by their opponents.  In truth, every act of legislation is, before experience, amenable to such destructive criticism as these critics urge against Home Rule.  I have not a doubt that they could have made out an unanswerable “case” against the Great Charter at Runnymede; and they would find it easy to prove on a priori grounds that the British Constitution is one of the most absurd, mischievous, and unworkable instruments that ever issued from human brains or from the evolution of events.  By their method of reasoning the Great Charter and other fundamental portions of the Constitution ought to have brought the Government of the British Empire to a deadlock long ago.  Every suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, every Act of Attainder, every statute for summary trial and conviction before justices of the peace, is a violation of the fundamental article of the Constitution, which requires that no man shall be imprisoned or otherwise punished except after lawful trial by his peers.[20] Consider also the magazines of explosive materials which lie hidden in the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, if they could only be ignited by the match of an ingenious theorist.  The Crown, as Lord Sherbrooke once somewhat irreverently expressed it, “can turn every cobbler in the land into a peer,” and could thus put an end, as the Duke of Wellington declared, to “the Constitution of this country."[21] “The Crown is not bound by Act of Parliament unless named therein by special and particular words."[22] The Crown can make peace or war without consulting Parliament, can by secret treaty saddle the nation with the most perilous obligations, and give away all such portions of the empire as do not rest on Statute.  The prerogative of mercy, too, would enable an eccentric Sovereign, aided by an obsequious Minister, to open the jails and let all the convicted criminals in the land loose upon society.[22] But criticism which proves too much in effect proves nothing.

In short, every stage in the progress of constitutional reform has, in matter of fact, been marked by similar predictions falsified by results, and the prophets who condemn Home Rule have no better credentials; indeed, much worse, for they proclaim the miserable failure of “things as they are,” whereas their predecessors were in their day satisfied with things as they were.[23]