n be easier than to ridicule
conclusions; and what happened now was that critics argued against this or
that contrivance in the machinery, because they insisted that no machinery
was needed at all, and that no contrivance could ever be made to work,
because the Irish mechanicians would infallibly devote all their
infatuated energy and perverse skill, not to work it, but to break it in
pieces. The Irish, in Mr. Gladstone's ironical paraphrase of these
singular opinions, had a double dose of original sin; they belonged wholly
to the kingdoms of darkness, and therefore the rules of that probability
which wise men have made the guide of life can have no bearing in any case
of theirs. A more serious way of stating the fundamental objection with
which Mr. Gladstone had to deal was this. Popular government is at the
best difficult to work. It is supremely difficult to work in a statutory
scheme with limits, reservations, and restrictions lurking round every
corner. Finally, owing to history and circumstance, no people in all the
world is less fitted to try a supremely difficult experiment in government
than the people who live in Ireland. Your superstructure, they said, is
enormously heavy, yet you are going to raise it on foundations that are a
quaking bog of incapacity and discontent. This may have been a good answer
to the policy of the bill. But to criticise its provisions from such a
point of view was as inevitably unfruitful as it would be to set a
hardened agnostic to revise the Thirty-nine articles or the mystic theses
of the Athanasian creed.

On the first reading, Mr. Chamberlain astounded allies and opponents alike
by suddenly revealing his view, that the true solution of the question was
to be sought in some form of federation. It was upon the line of
federation, and not upon the pattern of the self-governing colonies, that
we should find a way out of the difficulty.(199) Men could hardly trust
their ears. On the second reading, he startled us once more by declaring
that he was perfectly prepared, the very (M117) next day if we pleased, to
establish between this country and Ireland the relations subsisting
between the provincial legislatures and the dominion parliament of
Canada.(200) As to the first proposal, anybody could see that federation
was a vastly more revolutionary operation than the delegation of certain
legislative powers to a local parliament. Moreover before federating an
Irish legislature, you must fi