obable it is that so enormous a structure can endure, and how,
after all, the Hungarians have not got rid of the Emperor, who commands
the army and represents the brute force of the old _regime_, I do not
think he need feel greatly concerned. This may be all true, and yet the
Austro-Hungarian federalism is a valuable thing. It has proved that the
federal remedy is good for more than one disease, that it can cure both
too much unity and too little. The truth is that there are only two
essentials of a federal government. One is an agreement between the
various communities who are to live under it as to the manner in which
the power is to be divided between the general and local governments;
the other is an honest desire on the part of all concerned to make it
succeed. As a general rule, whatever the parties agree on and desire to
make work is likely to work, just as a Unitarian government is sure to
succeed if the people who live under it determine that it shall succeed.
If a federal plan be settled in the only right way, by amicable and
mutually respectful discussion between representative men, all the more
serious obstacles are certain to be revealed and removed. Those which
are not brought to light by such discussions are pretty sure to be
comparatively trifling, and to disappear before the general success of
arrangement. But by a "mutually respectful discussion" I mean discussion
in which good faith and intelligence of all concerned are acknowledged
on both sides.

In what I have said by way of criticism of a book which may be taken as
a particularly full exposition of the legal criticism that may be
levelled at Mr. Gladstone's scheme, I have not touched on the arguments
against Home Rule which Mr. Dicey draws from the amount of disturbance
it would cause in English political habits and arrangements. I freely
admit the weight of these arguments. The task of any English statesman
who gives Home Rule to Ireland in the only way in which it can be
given--with the assent of the British people--will be a very arduous
one. But this portion of Mr. Dicey's book, producing, as it does, the
distinctively English objections to Home rule, is to me much the most
instructive, because it shows the difficulty there would be in creating
the state of mind in England about any federal relation to Ireland which
would be necessary to make it succeed. I do not think it an exaggeration
to say that two-thirds of the English objections to Home