Parliament consisting of sixty English and sixty Irish members who sat
alternately at Westminster and at Dublin to transact or perplex or
obstruct the affairs common to the whole Empire. To imagine such an
arrangement, to sketch out in one's fancy, for example, how the common
budget decreed by the Delegations would be provided for by taxation
imposed by the Irish Parliament, is enough to show that the Dual system
is absolutely inapplicable to our circumstances. It could not last for a
year, and if by any miracle it did last for that time, the whole British
Empire would be reduced to confusion or ruin. The advocates of
innovation exhibit the most singular mixture of despair and hopefulness.
The presence in Parliament of eighty-six Parnellites makes them despair
of the British constitution, which has existed for centuries. They hope
or expect that three Parliaments, in two of which these very
Parnellites, or men like them, would reappear, would harmoniously
legislate for England, Ireland, and the British Empire, and this hope is
based on the alleged success of that Dual system which has not without
difficulty been kept going for not quite twenty years. The alliance of
scepticism and credulity, of which we have often heard in the sphere of
theology, is a startling phenomenon in the province of politics. The
Dual system, however, it will be urged by its admirers, has worked
well. Admit the fact, the success is clearly due to circumstances
negative and positive totally absent in the case of England and Ireland.
The bodies united by means of the compromise do not, like the United
Kingdom, constitute the centre of a world-wide Empire. Hungary has taken
up arms against the Austrian Emperor, yet there has never been in
strictness a feud between the Hungarians and the other subjects of the
Emperor. The compromise or alliance manifestly met the interest of both
portions of the monarchy: it restored to Hungary a constitution which
for eighteen years or more had been suppressed, but which had never been
given up; it secured, or went far to secure, the new constitutional