sence 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
liberties of the Austrian Empire. Hungary could not stand alone, and she
knew it. The compromise was in reality a politic alliance between the
two leading races among the many races governed by Francis Joseph. The
Germans and the Magyars came to terms; the alliance strengthened them
each against other foes. But with every political advantage the Dual
system, of which the permanence is not as yet at all secure, might have
proved as undurable as Grattan's Constitution of 1782 but for one
circumstance, to which I have already directed attention. At the head of
Austria-Hungary stands not an absolute, but a powerful monarch. The
authority of the Emperor is the spring which makes the cumbersome
machinery of a complicated constitution keep going. The matter is worth
attention The power of the Emperor William holds together the States of
the German Empire; the power of Francis Joseph keeps alive the Dual
system; where the Crown has a real authority trial may be made of
experiments in the way of local independence, which are impossible in a
State where, as in England, t