perhaps, not without bloodshed, but certainly by confiscations and persecutions.”  “There can be no longer any doubt that the Reform Bill is a stepping-stone in England to a Republic, and in Ireland to separation.”  Croker met the Queen in 1832, considered her very good-looking, but thought it not unlikely that “she may live to be plain Miss Guelph.”  Even Sir Robert Peel wrote:  “If I am to be believed, I foresee revolution as the consequence of this Bill;” and he “felt that it had ceased to be an object of ambition to any man of equable and consistent mind to enter into the service of the Crown.”  And as late as 1839, so robust a character as Sir James Graham thought the world was coming to an end because the young Queen gave her confidence to a Whig Minister.  “I begin to share all your apprehensions and forebodings,” he writes to Croker, “with regard to the probable issue of the present struggle.  The Crown in alliance with Democracy baffles every calculation on the balance of power in our mixed form of Government.  Aristocracy and Church cannot contend against Queen and people mixed; they must yield in the first instance, when the Crown, unprotected, will meet its fate, and the accustomed round of anarchy and despotism will run its course.”  And he prays that he may “lie cold before that dreadful day.” (Ibid., ii. 113, 140, 176, 181, 356.) Free Trade created a similar panic.  “Good God!” Croker exclaimed, “what a chaos of anarchy and misery do I foresee in every direction, from so comparatively small a beginning as changing an average duty of 8_s._ into a fixed duty of 8_s._, the fact being that the fixed duty means no duty at all; and no duty at all will be the overthrow of the existing social and political system of our country!” (Ibid., iii. 13.) And what have become of Mr. Lowe’s gloomy vaticinations as to the terrible consequences of the very moderate Reform Bill of 1866, followed as it was by a much more democratic measure?]

A LAWYER’S OBJECTIONS TO HOME RULE.

BY E.L.  GODKIN.

Mr. Dicey in his Case against Home Rule does me the honour to refer to an article which I wrote a year ago on “American Home Rule,"[24] expressing in one place “disagreement in the general conclusion to which the article is intended to lead,” and in another “inability to follow the inference” which he supposes me to draw “against all attempts to enforce an unpopular law.”  Now the object of that article, I may be permitted to explain, was twofold.  I desired, in the first place, to combat the notion which, it seemed to me, if I might judge from a great many of the speeches and articles on the Irish question, was widely diffused even among thoughtful Englishmen that the manner in which the Irish have expressed their discontent—­that is, through outrage and disorder—­was indicative of incapacity for self-government, and even imposed upon the Englishmen the duty, in the interest of morality