Parliamentary sovereignty--justice--finality.

[Sidenote: General character of Federalism.]

I. _Home Rule as Federalism._--Federal government is the latest
invention of constitutional science. Several circumstances confer upon
it at the present moment extraordinary prestige. It is a piece of
political mechanism which has been found to work with success in three
notorious instances. In its favour is engaged the pride--may we not say
vanity?--of one of the leading nations of the earth. Americans regard
Federalism with pardonable partiality. They are the original inventors
of the best Federal system in the world, and Federalism has made them
the greatest of all free communities. A polity under which the United
States has grown up and flourished, and fought the biggest war which has
been fought during the century, and come out of it victorious, and with
renewed strength, must, it is felt, be a constitution suited for all
nations who aspire to freedom. There is nothing therefore surprising in
the fact that Federalism is supposed to be the panacea for all social
evils, and all political perplexities, or that it should be thrust upon
our attention as the device for bringing England and her colonies into
closer connection, and (not perhaps quite consistently) for relaxing the
connection and terminating the feud between England and Ireland. We
should do well, therefore, to recollect what is the true nature of
Federalism. Federal government, whatever be its merits, is a mere
arrangement for the distribution of political power. It is an
arrangement which requires for its application certain well-defined
conditions.[32]

There must, in the first place, exist a body of countries; such, for
example, as the cantons of Switzerland, or the colonies of America, or