We have now before us the essential features of the new constitution framed by Gladstonians for the whole United Kingdom. We know its inherent defects and inconsistencies; we have considered what may be said on its behalf, or rather of the policy of which it is the outcome. The proposed change in our form of government touches the very foundations of the State, and deeply, though indirectly, threatens the unity of the whole Empire. Never surely since the day when the National Assembly of France drew up that Constitution of 1791, which built to be eternal endured for not quite a year, has an ancient nation been so strangely invited to accept an untried and unknown polity. The position indeed of the French constitution-makers was in some respects stronger and more defensible than the position of our English innovators. The members of the National Assembly knew precisely what they were doing. They meant to alter the fundamental institutions of France. A change moreover in the whole scheme of French government was an admitted necessity. France might be uncertain as to the working of the new constitution, but France was absolutely certain that the _ancien regime_ was detestable. Individuals or nations may wisely risk much when they are escaping from a social condition which they detest, they may know that an innovation is in itself of doubtful expediency, yet may consider any alleged reform worth a trial when no change can be a change for the worse. In the France of 1791 confidence in the future meant abhorrence of the past.