are two things of which English statesmen have had little experience. The one is a revolutionary movement, the other is the construction of a constitution. But the Home Rule Bill is at once the effect and the sign of a revolutionary movement, and the task in which the Gladstonians are engaged is the formation of a new constitution. Blind leaders are leading a blind people, and our blind leaders, some of whom care more for Radical supremacy in England than for Imperial supremacy in Ireland, are like many other men of our time, the slaves of phrases, such as 'trust in the people,' which pass muster for principles. If the blind lead the blind, what wonder if they stumble over a precipice? The peril in which the country stands is concealed from us by a curious reaction of opinion. Good political institutions, it was at one time held, were the cause of a nation's happiness, and England, it was firmly believed, owed her prosperity wholly to her constitution. A century of revolutions has taught us all that a good form of government cannot of itself save a state from ruin, and many of us have come to think that forms of government are nothing, and that no constitutional changes can impair the strength of England. No delusion however is more patent or more noxious. Never was a country richer in the elements of strength than were the Thirteen Colonies when their independence was acknowledged by England. Yet the Confederation by the vices of its constitution filled the colonies with discord, and made them both weak at home and contemptible abroad, whilst the creation of the United States restored them to peace and opened for them the road to greatness. The predominance for more than fifty years of the Slave Power in the politics of the American Union, the struggle measured by centuries through which at last the Protestant and progressive Cantons of Switzerland asserted their rightful supremacy over the Catholic and unprogressive Cantons of Switzerland, the weakness of Prussia when, not much more than forty[135] years back, she could hardly maintain her rights and her dignity against Austria, the classical instance of Germany, which though possessed of every source of power lay for generations at the mercy of France, mainly on account of vicious political institutions, are proofs, if evidence were wanting, of the capacity of ill-designed constitutions to hamper the action and threaten the prosperity of great nations. A constitution in truth is a national garb. A good constitution will not make a weak country strong, but an unsuitable constitution may reduce a strong country to feebleness. A weakling does not become a strong man by putting on armour, but a giant can derive no advantage from his strength if once he be got by fraud or force into a strait waistcoat.