of the political situation can be allowed to try unlimited experiments.  We are bound to scrutinise with care every provision of this brand-new polity.  We are bound to consider what will be their effect according to the known laws of human nature and under the actual circumstances of the time.  It is vain to tell us that many of our institutions remain untouched.  The introduction of new elements into an old political system may revolutionise the whole; the addition of new cloth to an old garment may, we all know, rend the whole asunder.  There is no need for panic; there is the utmost need for prudence.

FOOTNOTES: 

[5] References made in this treatise to the Home Rule Bill are, unless otherwise stated, made to the Bill as ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, February 17, 1893. A Leap in the Dark was published months before the Bill was sent up as amended to the House of Lords.

[6] This is true of both of Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and must necessarily be true of any Bill which satisfies even for a time the wishes of Home Rulers.

[7] I have substituted New Zealand for Victoria as the example of a typical self-governing colony; the position of Victoria has since 1900 been complicated by the country having become a State of the Australian Commonwealth or Confederation.

[8] See Dicey, Law of Constitution (7th ed.), ch. iii. pp. 136-140.  Compare Mill, Rep.  Government, ch. xvii.

[9] For the sake of convenience I throughout this treatise refer to the ‘Bill to amend the provision for the government of Ireland’ under its popular name of the Home Rule Bill, 1893, or simply the Bill.  See the Bill in Appendix.

[10] Bill, clause 5.

[11] (The constitutional history of Victoria affords a curious illustration of what will certainly happen in Ireland.) In Victoria the Legislature, though not termed a Parliament in the Constitution Act, 18 & 19 Vict, c. 54, has assumed, under a Victorian Act, the title of the Parliament of Victoria.  See Jenks, Government of Victoria, p. 236.  Who can doubt that the Irish Legislature will, by an Irish Act, give itself the title of the Parliament of Ireland?  I have therefore throughout these pages called the Irish Legislature the Irish Parliament.  Few things are more absurd and more noteworthy than the deliberate refusal of English Gladstonians to call the Irish Parliament by its right name.  They are willing to create an Irish Parliament; they are not willing to admit that they have created it.  See debates of May 9, in The Times, May 10, 1893.

[12] See Bill, clauses 19, 27, 28, 30.

[13] Bill, clauses 3, 4.

[14] Bill, clause 2.

[15] This will perhaps be disputed.  Trial by jury, it will be said, is saved by the expression ‘due process of law,’ in clause 4, sub-clause (5).  But this contention is, in my judgment, unfounded, and its validity must in any case be held open to extreme doubt.