other hand the power of the Irish to act as a disturbing agency in English politics has greatly increased, and the reason is that the stream of Irish discontent is fed by thousands of rills from the United States.  Every emigrant’s letter, every Irish-American newspaper, every returned emigrant with money in his pocket and a good coat on his back, helps to swell it, and there is not the slightest sign, that I can see, of its drying up.

Where Mr. Dicey is most formidable to the Home Rulers, as it seems to me, is in his chapter on “Home Rule as Federalism,” which is the form in which the Irish ask for it.  He attacks this in two ways.  One is by maintaining that the necessary conditions for a federal union between Great Britain and Ireland do not exist.  This disposes at one blow of all the experience derived from the working of the foreign federations, on which the advocates of Home Rule have relied a good deal.  The other is what I may call predictions that the federation even if set up would not work.  Either the state of facts on which all other federations have been built does not exist in Ireland, or if it now exists, will not, owing to the peculiarities of Irish character, continue to exist.  In other words, the federation will either fail at the outset, or fail in the long run.  No one can admire more than I do the force and ingenuity and wealth of illustration with which Mr. Dicey supports this thesis.  But unfortunately the arguments by which he assails Irish federalism might be, or might have been, used against all federations whatever.  They might have been used, as I shall try to show, against the most successful of them all, the Government of the United States.  I was reminded, while reading Mr. Dicey’s account of the impossibility of an Anglo-Irish federation, of Mr. Madison’s rehearsal in the Federalist (No. 38) of the objections made to the Federal Constitution after the Convention had submitted it to the States.  These objections covered every feature in it but one; and that, the mode of electing the President, curiously enough, is the only one which can be said to have utterly failed.  A more impressive example of the danger of a priori attacks on any political arrangement, history does not contain.  Mr. Madison says:  “This one tells me that the proposed Constitution ought to be rejected, because it is not a confederation of the states, but a government over individuals.  Another admits that it ought to be a government over individuals to a certain extent, but by no means to the extent proposed.  A third does not object to the government over individuals, or to the extent proposed, but to the want of a bill of rights.  A fourth concurs in the absolute necessity of a bill of rights, but contends that it ought to be declaratory not of the personal rights of individuals, but of the rights reserved to the states in their political capacity.  A fifth is of opinion that a bill of rights of any sort would be superfluous and misplaced,