"My plan of Home Rule for Ireland," writes an eminent Home Ruler, "would
establish between Ireland and the Imperial Parliament the same relations
in principle that exist between a State of the American Union and the
Federal Government, or between any State of the Dominion of Canada and
that Central Canadian Parliament which meets in Ottawa."

This statement exhibits both laxity of language and laxity of thought,
but it gives a definition of the objects proposed to himself by a
genuine Home Ruler which is sufficiently definite, for the ends of my
argument. Home Rule is, for our present purpose, Federalism. We may
therefore, assume that it involves the adoption throughout the present
United Kingdom of a constitution in principle, though not in detail,
like that of the United States. The United Kingdom would, if Mr.
McCarthy's proposals were adopted, be transformed into a confederacy;
the different States, say Great Britain and Ireland, or England,
Scotland, and Ireland, would bear to the whole union the same relation
which Virginia and New York bear to the United States; they would bear
towards each other the same relation which Virginia bears to New York,
or which they both bear towards Massachusetts. Such a constitution has,
it must be at once admitted, no necessary connection with Republicanism.
The King or Queen of England for the time being would occupy the
position of a hereditary president; this arrangement would, as Mr. Butt
seems to have perceived, increase rather than diminish the authority of
the Crown. It must, on the other hand, be noted that Federalism
necessarily involves the formation of a new constitution, not for
Ireland only, but for the whole of the United Kingdom. It is necessary
to insist upon this point. For half the fallacies of the arguments for
Home Rule rest upon the idea that Home Rule is a matter affecting
Ireland alone. 'Irish Federalism,' the title of a pamphlet by Mr. Butt,
is a term involving something like self-contradiction. The misnomer is