Yet even on this assumption the belief in Home Rule as a panacea for Irish ills is childish, and belongs to a bygone stage of opinion.  We now know that changes in political machinery, however important, do not of themselves produce content.  A poverty-stricken peasant in Connaught will not be made happy because a Parliament meets at Dublin.  We now further know that the difficulty of satisfying popular aspirations often arises from the fundamental faults of human nature.  Trust in the people may often be wiser than distrust, but to suppose that masses of men are wiser, more reasonable, or more virtuous than the individuals of which they consist, is as idle a political delusion as the corresponding ecclesiastical delusion that a church has virtues denied to the believers who make up the church.  On this point an anecdote makes my meaning clearer than an argument.  On May 15, 1848, the French National Assembly was invaded by an armed mob, who shouted and yelled for three hours and more, and threatened at any moment to slaughter the representatives of France.  From June 22-26, 1848, there raged the most terrible of the insurrections which Paris has seen.  For the first time in modern history the workmen of the capital rose against the body of the more or less well-to-do citizens.  There was not a man in Paris who did not tremble for his property and his life.  Householders feared the very servants in their homes.  Between these days of ferocity intervened a day of sentiment.  On May 21, 1848, the Assembly attended a Feast of Concord.  There were carts filled with allegorical figures, there were processions, there were embraces; the whole town, soldiers, national guards, gardes mobiles, armed workmen, a million of men or more, passed in array before the deputies.  The feast was a feast of concord, but every deputy had provided himself with pistols or some weapon of defence.  This was the occasion when we are told by the reporter of the scene, ’Carnot said to me with a touch of that silliness (niaiserie) which is always to be found mixed up with the virtues of honest democrats, “Believe me, my dear colleague, you must always trust the people.”  I remember I answered him rather rudely, “Ah! why didn’t you remind me of that on the day before May 15?"’ The anecdote is told by the greatest political thinker whom France has produced since the days of Montesquieu.  ‘Trust in the people’ did not appear the last word of political wisdom to Alexis de Tocqueville.[133]

The Gladstonian pleas to which answer has been made are, it will be said, arguments not in favour of our new constitution, but in support of Home Rule.  The remark is just; it points to a curious weakness in the reasoning of Gladstonians.  They adduce many reasons of more or less weight for conceding some kind of Home Rule to Ireland.  But few indeed are the reasons put forward, either in the House of Commons or elsewhere, in favour of the actual Home Rule Bill of 1893.  As to the merits of this definite