new constitution is not intended to give Ireland the
position of New Zealand. Thousands of miles separate New Zealand from
Great Britain. Ireland is separated from us by not much more than twelve
miles. New Zealand has never been hostile to England; her people are
loyal to the British Crown. Ireland, or part of the Irish people, has
been divided from England by a feud of centuries; it would be difficult
among Irish Nationalists to obtain even the show of loyalty to the
Crown. New Zealand is wealthy, and New Zealand pays not a single tax
into the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. Ireland is poor, and, if her
taxation is lightened by Home Rule, the tribute which will be paid to
England will be heavy, and far more galling than the taxes she now pays
in common with the rest of the United Kingdom. The new constitution,
again, is utterly unlike a colonial constitution. Its burdens would not
be tolerated by any one of our independent colonies. The rights it
gives, no less than the obligations it imposes, are foreign to our
colonial system. The presence of the Irish representation at Westminster
forbids all comparison between Ireland under Home Rule and New Zealand
under a system of colonial independence.

But the matter must be pressed further. Even were it possible to place
Ireland in the position either of an American State or Swiss Canton, or
of an independent colony, the arrangement would not meet the needs of
the United Kingdom. This is a point which has not as yet arrested
attention. For the safety of the United Kingdom it is absolutely
necessary that the authority of the Imperial Government, or, in other
words, the law of the land, should be enforced in Ireland in a sense in
which the law of the land is rarely enforced in federations, and in
which it is certainly not enforced by the Imperial Government in
self-governing colonies.

In federations the law of the land is nearly powerless when opposed to
the will of a particular State. President Jackson's reported dictum,
'John Marshall[118] has delivered his judgment, let him now enforce it
if he can,' and the fact that the judgment was never enforced,[119] are
things not to be forgotten. They are worth a thousand disquisitions on
the admirable working of federalism. But there is no need to rely on a
traditional story, which, however, is an embodiment of an undoubted
transaction. The plainest facts of American history all tell the same
tale. No Abolitionist could in 1850