led to unexpected results.  The statesmen who meant merely to give Home Rule to Ireland have stumbled into the making of a new constitution for the United Kingdom.  What wonder that their workmanship betrays its accidental origin.  It has no coherence, no consistency; nothing is called by its right name, and words are throughout substituted for facts; the new Parliament of Ireland is denied its proper title; the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is nominally saved, and is really destroyed; and the very statesmen who proclaim the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament refuse to assert the subordination of the Irish Parliament.  The authors of the constitution are at sea as to its leading principles, and its most essential provision they deem an organic detail, which may at any moment be modified or removed.  The whole thing is an incongruous patchwork affair, made up of shreds and tatters torn from the institutions of other lands.  It is as inconsistent with the proposed and rejected Constitution of 1886 as with the existing Constitution of England.  While however our constitution-makers tender for the acceptance of the nation a scheme of fundamental change, whereof the effect is uncertain, conjectural, and perilous, and the permanence is not guaranteed by its authors, Englishmen are well satisfied with their old constitution; they may desire its partial modification or expansion, they have never even contemplated its overthrow.  Politicians, in short, who meant to initiate a moderate reform, are pressing a revolutionary change on a country which neither needs nor desires a revolution; they propose to get rid of grave, though temporary, inconveniences by a permanent alteration of which no man can calculate the results in our whole system of government.  Never before was a nation so strangely advised by such bewildered counsellors to take for so little apparent reason so desperate a leap in the dark.

FOOTNOTES: 

[134] The whole gist of this chapter applies to the state of England in 1911 with greater force than even to its condition in 1893.  Home Rule will be carried, if at all, only by a House of Commons freed from the authority of the House of Lords, and from the need of an appeal to the people.

[135] Now sixty-one years.

[136] If any one wishes to see the difference between local self-government and Home Rule, let him compare the Bill for the extension of self-government in Ireland, brought in by the late Ministry, with the Home Rule Bill.  The Local Government Bill went very far, some persons may even maintain dangerously far, in creating and in extending the authority of local bodies in Ireland.  But it was not Home Rule, or anything like Home Rule.  The most extended Local Government Bill and the most restricted Home Rule Bill differ fundamentally in principle.  The one in effect denies, the other in effect concedes, a separate national government to Ireland.