The authors of our new constitution can hardly be called the designers of their own handiwork; they have been the sport of accident. Their intention, or rather the intention of their leader, was in 1886 merely to grant some sort of Parliamentary independence to Ireland. The resolution to concede Home Rule was sudden; it may have been taken up without due weighing of its consequences. It has assuredly led to unexpected results. The statesmen who meant merely to give Home Rule to Ireland have stumbled into the making of a new constitution for the United Kingdom. What wonder that their workmanship betrays its accidental origin. It has no coherence, no consistency; nothing is called by its right name, and words are throughout substituted for facts; the new Parliament of Ireland is denied its proper title; the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is nominally saved, and is really destroyed; and the very statesmen who proclaim the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament refuse to assert the subordination of the Irish Parliament. The authors of the constitution are at sea as to its leading principles, and its most essential provision they deem an organic detail, which may at any moment be modified or removed. The whole thing is an incongruous patchwork affair, made up of shreds and tatters torn from the institutions of other lands. It is as inconsistent with the proposed and rejected Constitution of 1886 as with the existing Constitution of England. While however our constitution-makers tender for the acceptance of the nation a scheme of fundamental change, whereof the effect is uncertain, conjectural, and perilous, and the permanence is not guaranteed by its authors, Englishmen are well satisfied with their old constitution; they may desire its partial modification or expansion, they have never even contemplated its overthrow. Politicians, in short, who meant to initiate a moderate reform, are pressing a revolutionary change on a country which neither needs nor desires a revolution; they propose to get rid of grave, though temporary, inconveniences by a permanent alteration of which no man can calculate the results in our whole system of government. Never before was a nation so strangely advised by such bewildered counsellors to take for so little apparent reason so desperate a leap in the dark. FOOTNOTES: [134] The whole gist of this chapter applies to the state of England in 1911 with greater force than even to its condition in 1893. Home Rule will be carried, if at all, only by a House of Commons freed from the authority of the House of Lords, and from the need of an appeal to the people. [135] Now sixty-one years.