escence with which so-called practical politicians are prepared to accept Home Rule is grounded, to a far greater extent than any one who respects the character of England likes to confess, upon the naïve but intense conviction that it is too much to expect from five hundred and more English gentlemen that they should take the trouble of withstanding the continuous pressure exerted by eighty-six Parnellites. Cowardice masks itself under the show of compromise, and men of eminent respectability yield to the terror of being bored concessions which their forefathers would have refused to the threat of armed rebellion.'

In short, those who do not think with Mr. Dicey that Home Rule is an evil, are in reality only cloaking their cowardice under an affectation of political opinion; they are not merely liars, all those Englishmen who support Home Rule, but they are liars from the basest of influences, from the prick and goad of personal fear for their leisure. With what wholesale ethical corruption, with what wholesale mental degradation Mr. Dicey charges his countrymen !

Mr. Morley praises Mr. Dicey too highly when he writes thus of him :

'He does not, like Mr. Goldwin Smith, flatter himself that he has added cogency to his argument by crying out that Mr. Gladstone is an unscrupulous demagogue; or, like the really very amiable Mr. Lecky, that he has cleared the air by dividing those who differ from

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him into knaves and fools. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nobody could maintain his own opinion against a rival scholar, on the meaning of a Latin verb or a Greek particle, without running serious risk of being told that he practised nameless crimes, and was not the father of his own children. Mr. Dicey honourably abstains from these ornaments of debate. There is nothing about him of the mouton enragé.'

To accuse a vast body of Englishmen who have avowed certain political opinions of being liars and worse than liars is to return to the worst phases of Humanistic controversy. But if even we were prepared to grant Mr. Dicey's detestable assumption, we shall trip him up on the very conclusion which he draws from it. Why, it is one of the very strongest points in Mr. Dicey's case that the forefathers of the men whom he now accuses of cowardice did yield concessions to the threat of armed rebellion. What becomes of all the arguments he bases upon the conduct of the Volunteers of 1782 if the threat of armed rebellion' only met with refusal from the forefathers of the men whom Mr. Dicey-now denounces for their timidity? The English advocates of Home Rule will smile at a comparison instituted to their disadvantage in defiance of history, in defiance of the very fact upon which Mr. Dicey so largely relies in order to combat any concession of strength to Ireland.

Mr. Dicey gravely underestimates the strength of the Home Rule movement in England and its power over the

democratic mind. Whether we play, or labour, or sleep, or dance, or study,' says Feltham, the sun posts on and the sand runs.' With every stage of the sun's course and every grain of the sliding sand the cause of Home Rule gains firmer ground in England and a stronger hold upon the enlightened English mind.

CHAPTER IV.

ENGLAND AND HOME RULE.

THE imperfections, not merely of Mr. Dicey's method, but of his way of working out his method, grow more patent as we progress through his book. In the fourth chapter the astonishing weakness of his arguments, the almost incredible looseness of his reasonings, the amazing inaccuracy of his conclusions, are more than usually obvious. After a patronising recognition of the existence of human feeling and human sentiment and human emotion as things to be tolerated by a Chair, Mr. Dicey proceeds to set out six of the arguments that can, he considers, be brought forward by Englishmen in favour of Home Rule: The argument from foreign experience -the argument from the will of the Irish people-the argument from the lessons of Irish history-the argument from the virtues of self-government-the argument from the necessity for Coercion Acts-the argument from the inconvenience to England of refusing Home Rule to Ireland.'

Mr. Dicey supports the argument from foreign expe

rience by bringing forward the United States, the Swiss Confederacy, Canada and the Australasian Colonies, the German Empire, Turkey in relation to some of her subservient States, the relationships between Russia and Finland, Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, and, finally, between Austria and Hungary. Having mentioned these as the chief supports of English arguments in favour of Home Rule to be drawn from foreign sources, Mr. Dicey sets aside for the moment the cases of the United States, the British Colonies, and the Swiss Confederacy, and proceeds to consider the other cases he has brought into court. In this consideration he acts with what it is hardly possible not to call perversity. There is some difficulty in treating with perfect seriousness a line of reasoning which, proceeding from the quarter whence it comes, holds up for our admiration the wisdom or lenity of Turkish rule in Crete, and extols the supreme justice of the system upon which rests the AustroHungarian monarchy; which implies that the arts of government may be learnt from the Russian administration of Finland, and omits all reference to the disastrous results of the attempt to endow Poland with some sort of independence; which bases weighty inferences as to the proper relation between England and Ireland on the concession by Denmark to the scanty inhabitants of a desolate island lying 1,100 miles from her coast, of as much autonomy (if that be the right term) as under the Crown of England has been enjoyed for generations by Jersey or Man; and which suggests lamentations over